| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: those when they had done or not done the external act. Therefore God
has added these two commandments in order that it be esteemed as sin
and forbidden to desire or in any way to aim at getting our neighbor's
wife or possessions; and especially because under the Jewish government
man-servants and maid-servants were not free as now to serve for wages
as long as they pleased, but were their master's property with their
body and all they had, as cattle and other possessions. Moreover,
every man had power over his wife to put her away publicly by giving
her a bill of divorce, and to take another. Therefore they were in
constant danger among each other that if one took a fancy to another's
wife, he might allege any reason both to dismiss his own wife and to
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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 Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: no English but such as fits a theme so stately. Although she never left
the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me, nor saw the boy, or the
girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew quite well who the boy
was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered one of his grandmothers
whom she had visited during her own girlhood, long before the war, both
in Kings Port and at the family plantation; and this old memory led her
to express a kindly interest in him. How odd and far away that interest
seems, now that it has been turned to cold displeasure!
Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell
you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple which
Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to feel
rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I had known
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