| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: roots are even more nourishing than the leaves or branches, and the
meaner people, when they go a journey, make no provision of any
other victuals. The word ensete signifies the tree against hunger,
or the poor's tree, though the most wealthy often eat of it. If it
be cut down within half a foot of the ground and several incisions
made in the stump, each will put out a new sprout, which, if
transplanted, will take root and grow to a tree. The Abyssins
report that this tree when it is cut down groans like a man, and, on
this account, call cutting down an ensete killing it. On the top
grows a bunch of five or six figs, of a taste not very agreeable,
which they set in the ground to produce more trees.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: trample on its conventions, its laws, its customs, sentiments, and
sciences; you reduce them all to the proportions such things take when
viewed by you beyond this universe."
"Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong to
love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended
strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of
all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and
broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me!
No, we can never come to terms."
"You are more maliciously unkind to-night than I have ever known you."
"Unkind!" she said, with a look which seemed to blend all feelings
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon: ordinances of God, and that charity be practiced in such
ordinances. Therefore, Christians are necessarily bound to
obey their own magistrates and laws save only when commanded
to sin; for then they ought to obey God rather than men. Acts
5, 29.
Article XVII: Of Christ's Return to Judgment.
Also they teach that at the Consummation of the World Christ
will appear for judgment and will raise up all the dead; He
will give to the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting
joys, but ungodly men and the devils He will condemn to be
tormented without end.
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