| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: expect him to talk pretty much as the Discipline ordained--
that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to inquire
after their souls, and generally to minister grace
to his hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves
into classes, ranging from those who would wish nothing
else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor.
There were others whom he would please much better by not
talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it,
he subscribed now for a daily paper that he might have
a perpetually renewed source of good conversational
topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: got by the Revolution; it is all for the children now-a-days, and
parents are suppressed. I'm bringing up Mouche on another tack; he
loves me, the little scamp,"--giving his grandson a poke.
"It seems to me you are making him a little thief, like all the rest,"
said Sibilet; "he never lies down at night without some sin on his
conscience."
"Ha! Monsieur Sibilet, his conscience is as clean as yours any day!
Poor child! what can he steal? A little grass! that's better than
throttling a man! He don't know mathematics like you, nor subtraction,
nor addition, nor multiplication,--you are very unjust to us, that you
are! You call us a nest of brigands, but you are the cause of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: Lycurgus pursued a different path. Clothes were things, he held, the
furnishing of which might well enough be left to female slaves. And,
believing that the highest function of a free woman was the bearing of
children, in the first place he insisted on the training of the body
as incumbent no less on the female than the male; and in pursuit of
the same idea instituted rival contests in running and feats of
strength for women as for men. His belief was that where both parents
were strong their progeny would be found to be more vigorous.
And so again after marriage. In view of the fact that immoderate
intercourse is elsewhere permitted during the earlier period of
matrimony, he adopted a principle directly opposite. He laid it down
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