| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians by Martin Luther: righteousness is to plagiarize the Gospel. The Gospel brings donations. It
pleads for open hands to take what is being offered. The Law has nothing to
give. It demands, and its demands are impossible.
Our opponents come back at us with Cornelius. Cornelius, they point out, was
"a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much
alms to the people and prayed God always." Because of these qualifications,
he merited the forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Ghost. So reason
our opponents.
I answer: Cornelius was a Gentile. You cannot deny it. As a Gentile he
was uncircumcised. As a Gentile he did not observe the Law. He never
gave the Law any thought. For all that, he was justified and received
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: some haste and set up for the celebrations of the anniversary
of the revolution last November. The painters also had been
turned loose to do what they could with the hoardings, and
though the weather had damaged many of their pictures,
enough was left to show what an extraordinary carnival that
had been. Where a hoarding ran along the front of a house
being repaired the painters had used the whole of it as a vast
canvas on which they had painted huge symbolic pictures
of the revolution. A whole block in the Tverskaya was so
decorated. Best, I think, were the row of wooden booths
almost opposite the Hotel National in the Okhotnia Ryadi.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: accessible. They were still piling up, they were scattered about, mention
of them was incidental and fugitive, they could be missed by anybody who
was not diligently alert to find them. To-day it is quite otherwise. The
facts and figures have been compiled, arranged, published in accessible
and convenient form; therefore to-day, the man or woman who persists in
asking what England did in the war is not honest but dishonest or
mentally spotted, and does not want to be answered. They don't want to
know. The question is merely a camouflage of their spite, and were every
item given of the gigantic and magnificent contribution that England made
to the defeat of the Kaiser and all his works, it would not stop their
evil mouths. Not for them am I here setting forth a part of what England
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