| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: reality of evil and cruelty, questioning and seeking after God.
What does the National Mission offer? On Tower Hill the bishop
seems to have been chiefly busy with a wrangling demonstration
that ten thousand a year is none too big a salary for a man
subject to such demands and expenses as his see involves. So far
from making anything out of his see he was, he declared, two
thousand a year to the bad. Some day, when the church has
studied efficiency, I suppose that bishops will have the leisure
to learn something about the general state of opinion and
education in their dioceses. The Bishop of London was evidently
unaware of the almost automatic response of the sharp socialists
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: need not do any good works", when all they hear is about the
preaching about the works themselves, sated in such a clear
strong way: "No works", "without works", "not by works"! If it is
not offensive to preach "without works", "not by works"! If it is
not offensive to preach "without works", "not by works"!, "no
works", why is it offensive to preach "by faith alone"?
Still more offensive is that St. Paul does not reject just
ordinary works, but works of the law! It follows that one could
take offense at that all the more and say that the law is
condemned and cursed before God and one ought only do what is
contrary to the law as it is said in Rom. 3: "Why not do evil so
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: imprisoned here with me are in many respects more fortunate than I
am. The little way in grey city or green field that saw their sin
is small; to find those who know nothing of what they have done
they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight
and the dawn; but for me the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth,
and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead. For
I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of
crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of
infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it
required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is
but one step, if as much as one.
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