| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: first missionaries came; they found the land already self-purged of
its old and bloody faith; they were embraced, almost on their
arrival, with enthusiasm; what troubles they supported came far
more from whites than from Hawaiins; and to these last they stood
(in a rough figure) in the shoes of God. This is not the place to
enter into the degree or causes of their failure, such as it is.
One element alone is pertinent, and must here be plainly dealt
with. In the course of their evangelical calling, they - or too
many of them - grew rich. It may be news to you that the houses of
missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu. It
will at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: "Take care of those guns. You will have something loose next,"
growled Amyas.
"We will take care of the guns, if the Lord will take care of the
wind," said Yeo.
"We shall have plenty before night," said Cary, "and thunder too."
"So much the better," said Amyas. "It may roar till it splits the
heavens, if it does but let me get my work done."
"He's not far off, I warrant," said Cary. "One lift of the cloud,
and we should see him."
"To windward of us, as likely as not," said Amyas. "The devil
fights for him, I believe. To have been on his heels sixteen days,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to the
sympathies of the time, and gratified the immoderate love of the
marvelous, which haunts the mind of man in every age. This effort of
man to clutch the infinite, which for ever slips through his
ineffectual grasp, this last tourney of thought against thought, was a
task worthy of an assembly where the most stupendous human imagination
ever known, perhaps, at that moment shone.
The Doctor began by summing up in a mild and even tone the principal
points he had so far established:
"No intellect was the exact counterpart of another. Had man any right
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