| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: thought: whether he was right in accepting the position in which
he had not so much placed himself as been placed by the
Archimandrite and the Abbot. That position had begun after the
recovery of the fourteen-year-old boy. From that time, with each
month, week, and day that passed, Sergius felt his own inner life
wasting away and being replaced by external life. It was as if
he had been turned inside out.
Sergius saw that he was a means of attracting visitors and
contributions to the monastery, and that therefore the
authorities arranged matters in such a way as to make as much use
of him as possible. For instance, they rendered it impossible
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: true representative of God at the christening is the child itself.
But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little
customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or
must originally have meant something, and that we understand and
believe that something.
However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current
thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we
are very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no
theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of
its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like
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