| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: strangers; but the groom saw him, and halloed to him to know where
Mr. Grimes, the chimney-sweep, lived. Now, Mr. Grimes was Tom's
own master, and Tom was a good man of business, and always civil to
customers, so he put the half-brick down quietly behind the wall,
and proceeded to take orders.
Mr. Grimes was to come up next morning to Sir John Harthover's, at
the Place, for his old chimney-sweep was gone to prison, and the
chimneys wanted sweeping. And so he rode away, not giving Tom time
to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of
interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself.
Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: a true one. If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would
be all the more mistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once more
before that problem of truth which confronted us at the end of
the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned to
mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical
states establish the truth of those theological affections in
which the saintly life has its root?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description,
mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic
drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of
them in terms that point in definite philosophical directions.
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