| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
Second Inaugural Address |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Went forth again to fight.
"O, why should I dwell here
With a weird upon my life,
When the clansmen shout for battle
And the war-swords clash in strife?
I cannae joy at feast,
I cannae sleep in bed,
For the wonder of the word
And the warning of the dead.
It sings in my sleeping ears,
It hums in my waking head,
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: pleasure and mind, and pronounce upon them; for we ought to see to which of
the two they are severally most akin.
PROTARCHUS: You are speaking of beauty, truth, and measure?
SOCRATES: Yes, Protarchus, take truth first, and, after passing in review
mind, truth, pleasure, pause awhile and make answer to yourself--as to
whether pleasure or mind is more akin to truth.
PROTARCHUS: There is no need to pause, for the difference between them is
palpable; pleasure is the veriest impostor in the world; and it is said
that in the pleasures of love, which appear to be the greatest, perjury is
excused by the gods; for pleasures, like children, have not the least
particle of reason in them; whereas mind is either the same as truth, or
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