| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: but in a brief second we were engaged once more in our
own battle with only the unquenchable battle cry of the
women to remind us that they still fought--"Rise slaves!"
"Rise slaves!"
Only a single thin rank of men now stood between us
and Issus. Her face was blue with terror. Foam flecked
her lips. She seemed too paralysed with fear to move.
Only the youth and I fought now. The others all had
fallen, and I was like to have gone down too from a nasty
long-sword cut had not a hand reached out from behind
my adversary and clutched his elbow as the blade was
The Gods of Mars |
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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved. I see God
indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I
could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual
understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity. One may
be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities
if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday
life. There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its
tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it,
as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its
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