| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: to see Him; I want to touch him. Let me die!" He folded his hands,
trembling. "How can I wait so long--for long, long years perhaps? I want
to die--to see Him. I will die any death. Oh, let me come!"
Weeping he bowed himself, and quivered from head to foot. After a long
while he lifted his head.
"Yes; I will wait; I will wait. But not long; do not let it be very long,
Jesus King. I want you; oh, I want you--soon, soon!" He sat still,
staring across the plain with his tearful eyes.
Service No. II.
In the front room of the farmhouse sat Tant Sannie in her elbow-chair. In
her hand was her great brass-clasped hymn-book, round her neck was a clean
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: of a Te Deum sung by torchlight. The old abbey church of San-
Lucar, a marvelous building erected by the Moors, a mosque of
Allah, which for three centuries had heard the name of Christ,
could not hold the throng that poured in to see the ceremony.
Hidalgos in their velvet mantles, with their good swords at their
sides, swarmed like ants, and were so tightly packed in among the
pillars that they had not room to bend the knees, which never
bent save to God. Charming peasant girls, in the basquina that
defines the luxuriant outlines of their figures, lent an arm to
white-haired old men. Young men, with eyes of fire, walked beside
aged crones in holiday array. Then came couples tremulous with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: deceive the world by saying the same thing in entirely different forms, is
a strain of art beyond most of us.' 'Yes, Socrates,' said Zeno; 'but
though you are as keen as a Spartan hound, you do not quite catch the
motive of the piece, which was only intended to protect Parmenides against
ridicule by showing that the hypothesis of the existence of the many
involved greater absurdities than the hypothesis of the one. The book was
a youthful composition of mine, which was stolen from me, and therefore I
had no choice about the publication.' 'I quite believe you,' said
Socrates; 'but will you answer me a question? I should like to know,
whether you would assume an idea of likeness in the abstract, which is the
contradictory of unlikeness in the abstract, by participation in either or
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