| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: can do for Bourgeat is thus to satisfy his pious wishes, on the
days when that mass is said, at the beginning of each season of
the year, I go for his sake and say the required prayers; and I
say with the good faith of a sceptic--'Great God, if there is a
sphere which Thou hast appointed after death for those who have
been perfect, remember good Bourgeat; and if he should have
anything to suffer, let me suffer it for him, that he may enter
all the sooner into what is called Paradise.'
"That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opinions
can allow himself. But God must be a good fellow; He cannot owe
me any grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune if
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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 Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: only by some unusual catastrophe, while for the origination of
new species something called an act of "special creation" was
necessary; and as to the nature of such extraordinary events
there was endless room for guesswork; but the discovery of
natural selection was the discovery of a process, going on
perpetually under our very eyes, which must inevitably of itself
extinguish some species and bring new ones into being. In these
and countless other ways we have learned that all the rich
variety of nature is pervaded by unity of action, such as we
might expect to find if nature is the manifestation of an
infinite God who is without variableness or shadow of turning,
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
