| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors,
gay gentlemen, and even cowled monks, are crowding the floor,
peeping over each other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades;
while in the centre, over his "subject"--which one of those same
cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius, upright,
proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the
impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of
steel, destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature,
which are the laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race
than all the swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in
any other, at the bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: Whether he admonished people, or simply blessed them, or prayed
for the sick, or advised people about their lives, or listened to
expressions of gratitude from those he had helped by precepts, or
alms, or healing (as they assured him)--he could not help being
pleased at it, and could not be indifferent to the results of his
activity and to the influence he exerted. He thought himself a
shining light, and the more he felt this the more was he
conscious of a weakening, a dying down of the divine light of
truth that shone within him.
'In how far is what I do for God and in how far is it for men?'
That was the question that insistently tormented him and to which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: which always came when he used this phrase--"The soul of man,
when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous
toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof."
It was one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding
speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction
which he associated with various points of view or states of mind;
and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense
of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given
a strict quotation.
CHAPTER XLI.
"By swaggering could I never thrive,
Middlemarch |
