| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: It appealed to the common conscience of men. It proclaimed a
universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from the
lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.
The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life
and death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told
that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or
beyond punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way,
there was an end of morality among them. Every man, from the
greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his
powers of evil. That method was being tried in France, and in Spain
likewise, during those very years. Notorious crimes were hushed up
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and
inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.
Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a
sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most
unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him
sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two
together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is
something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity
with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the
works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of
inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: tion of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a thing
done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the
quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now,
driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of
a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no
condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted
me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the near-
ness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the
darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of
wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from
the moment when I had found him crouching beside me,
War of the Worlds |
