| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: useful to the builder when he is building a house?
CRITIAS: They are.
SOCRATES: And would you say that those things are useful which are
employed in house building,--stones and bricks and beams and the like, and
also the instruments with which the builder built the house, the beams and
stones which they provided, and again the instruments by which these were
obtained?
CRITIAS: It seems to me that they are all useful for building.
SOCRATES: And is it not true of every art, that not only the materials but
the instruments by which we procure them and without which the work could
not go on, are useful for that art?
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe
to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely,
or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally
social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the
cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished
personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible
truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself
exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers
and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about
the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is
rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy
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