| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: drowning creatures:
"Those who have faith shall be saved; let them follow me!"
He stood upright, and walked with a firm step upon the waves. The
young mother at once took her child in her arms, and followed at his
side across the sea. The soldier too sprang up, saying in his homely
fashion, "Ah! /nom d'un pipe/! I would follow /you/ to the devil;" and
without seeming astonished by it, he walked on the water. The worn-out
sinner, believing in the omnipotence of God, also followed the
stranger.
The two peasants said to each other, "If they are walking on the sea,
why should we not do as they do?" and they also arose and hastened
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: himself--yawned--opening his mouth as widely as possible and bringing his
teeth together afterwards with a sharp "click." The sound of that click
fascinated him; he repeated it quickly several times, with a snapping
movement of the jaws. What teeth! he thought. Sound as a bell, every man
jack of them. Never had one out, never had one stopped. That comes of no
tomfoolery in eating, and a good regular brushing night and morning. He
raised himself on his left elbow and waved his right arm over the side of
the bed to feel for the chair where he put his watch and chain overnight.
No chair was there--of course, he'd forgotten, there wasn't a chair in this
wretched spare room. Had to put the confounded thing under his pillow.
"Half-past eight, Sunday, breakfast at nine--time for the bath"--his brain
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the
Christian ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He
endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and
would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had,
as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But
the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty
and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain,
and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to
Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism
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