| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: offence, we must keep fasts and do other things which they
consider necessary. This is required of us by charity, which
injures no one, but serves all men. It is not the fault of these
persons that they are weak, but that of their pastors, who by the
snares and weapons of their own traditions have brought them into
bondage and wounded their souls when they ought to have been set
free and healed by the teaching of faith and liberty. Thus the
Apostle says, "If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no
flesh while the world standeth" (1 Cor. viii. 13); and again, "I
know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing
unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything to be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Polly of the Circus by Margaret Mayo: applause.
But Big Jim stood apart. He was thinking of the buttons that his
clumsy fingers used to force into the stiff, starchy holes too
small for them and of the pigtails so stubborn at the ends; and
Toby was remembering the little shoes that had once needed to be
laced in the cold, dark mornings, and the strings that were
always snapping.
Something had gone.
They were not philosophers to reason like Emerson, that for
everything we lose we gain something; they were simple souls,
these two, they could only feel.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: the worst kind of suicide, besides, which is to get hanged at the
King's charges.
What was I doing it for? I asked, as I went down the high Street and
out north by Leith Wynd. First I said it was to save James Stewart;
and no doubt the memory of his distress, and his wife's cries, and a
word or so I had let drop on that occasion worked upon me strongly. At
the same time I reflected that it was (or ought to be) the most
indifferent matter to my father's son, whether James died in his bed or
from a scaffold. He was Alan's cousin, to be sure; but so far as
regarded Alan, the best thing would be to lie low, and let the King,
and his Grace of Argyll, and the corbie crows, pick the bones of his
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