| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: many reasons; and one of them is that children all like the story of
Jonah and the whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of
demonstrations by Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah
would not have fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be
credible of a whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on
earth can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or any other
statement of the case for religion in abstract terms. The object of a
moral instruction book is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof
against controversy, nor even credible: its object is to make
children good; and if it makes them sick instead its place is the
waste-paper basket.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: we had both expected with so much anxiety. I
then began to remind him of his promise to restore
me with my fame uninjured to the world. He promised
me in general terms, that nothing should be
wanting which his power could add to my happiness,
but forbore to release me from my confinement.
I knew how much my reception in the world
depended upon my speedy return, and was therefore
outrageously impatient of his delays, which I
now perceived to be only artifices of lewdness. He
told me at last, with an appearance of sorrow, that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: destroy that which He is to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He
have created an imperfect man?
"If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man
attributes to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation
perfect? The idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely
intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the
degradation of His work, and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect
world is, necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not perish, it
could neither advance nor recede, it would revolve in the everlasting
circumference from which it would never issue. In that case God would
be dependent on His work; it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we
Seraphita |
