The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows,
but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard,
shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I
went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian:
"The garden, the garden--do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!"
She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, "Nothing here
is mine," she answered in English, coldly and sadly.
"Oh, you are English; how delightful!" I remarked, ingenuously.
"But surely the garden belongs to the house?"
"Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me." She was a long,
lean, pale person, habited apparently in a dull-colored
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: right but brand the telling of this right thing as wrong - even
though something cannot be simultaneously right and wrong.
Furthermore, I am not the only one, nor the first, to say that
faith alone makes one righteous. There was Ambrose, Augustine and
many others who said it before me. And if one is to read and
understand St. Paul, the same thing must be said and not anything
else. His words, as well, are blunt - "no works" - none at all!
If it is not works, it must be faith alone. Oh what a marvelous,
constructive and inoffensive teaching that would be, to be taught
that one can be saved by works as well as by faith. That would be
like saying that it is not Christ's death alone that takes away
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: ventilating fans in a little chamber within that remote
building wondering what was happening in the world!
Looking more attentively as this warlike episode
moved silently across the centre of the mirror, Graham
saw that the white building was surrounded on
every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe
in concise phrases how its defenders had sought by
such destruction to isolate themselves from a storm.
He spoke of the loss of men that huge downfall had
entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an
improvised mortuary among the wreckage showed
 When the Sleeper Wakes |