| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: cabinet-maker and furniture broker, and my wife at
her needle; and, as our little earnings in slavery
were not all spent on the journey, we were getting
on very well, and would have made money, if we had
not been compelled by the General Government, at
the bidding of the slaveholders, to break up busi-
ness, and fly from under the Stars and Stripes to
save our liberties and our lives.
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave
Bill, an enactment too infamous to have been
thought of or tolerated by any people in the world,
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: science, pacific yet useful, these young men did an actual good in the
midst of so much misery, and formed a bond of sympathy with other men
of science in the various countries through which the cruel
civilization of the Republic passed.
The two young men were each provided with a pass and a commission as
assistant-surgeon signed Coste and Bernadotte; and they were on their
way to join the demi-brigade to which they were attached. Both
belonged to moderately rich families in Beauvais, a town in which the
gentle manners and loyalty of the provinces are transmitted as a
species of birthright. Attracted to the theatre of war before the date
at which they were required to begin their functions, they had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: prepare his pupils, to receive the vitalizing truths of Christ.
Now, at last, the Messiah or Christ had come as a second Adam,
and being without sin had been raised by Jehovah out of Sheol and
taken up into heaven, as testimony to men that the power of sin
and death was at last defeated. The way henceforth to avoid death
and escape the exile to Sheol was to live spiritually like Jesus,
and with him to be dead to sensual requirements. Faith, in Paul's
apprehension, was not an intellectual assent to definitely
prescribed dogmas, but, as Matthew Arnold has well pointed out,
it was an emotional striving after righteousness, a developing
consciousness of God in the soul, such as Jesus had possessed,
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
