| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: years I have been praying and hoping for the day that would
carry me once more to this grim old planet of yours, for
which, with all its cruel and terrible customs, I feel a bond
of sympathy and love even greater than for the world that
gave me birth.
"For ten years have I been enduring a living death of
uncertainty and doubt as to whether Dejah Thoris lived, and
now that for the first time in all these years my prayers have
been answered and my doubt relieved I find myself, through
a cruel whim of fate, hurled into the one tiny spot of all
Barsoom from which there is apparently no escape, and if
The Gods of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: he whistles, he yells--I never saw such an Injun to yell.
All times of the night--it never made any difference to him.
He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular,
but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it.
I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me
out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful
war-whoops. A queer being--very queer being; no respect
for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me "Johnny."
And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably.
This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl.
Nobody could sleep where that man--and his family--was.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: Jerusalem to the time of the Quartodeciman controversy (A. D.
70-170). Finally, there is the vast collection of apocryphal,
heretical, and patristic literature, from the writings of Justin
Martyr, the pseudo-Clement, and the pseudo-Ignatius, down to the
time of the Council of Nikaia, when the official theories of
Christ's person assumed very nearly the shape which they have
retained, within the orthodox churches of Christendom, down to
the present day. As we pointed out in the foregoing essay, while
all this voluminous literature throws but an uncertain light upon
the life and teachings of the founder of Christianity, it
nevertheless furnishes nearly all the data which we could desire
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
