| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: not depending upon or following the nature of language when I
inserted the word "solum" (alone) in Rom. 3 as the text itself,
and St. Paul's meaning, urgently necessitated and demanded it. He
is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine in this
passage - namely that we are justified by faith in Christ without
any works of the Law. In fact, he rejects all works so completely
as to say that the works of the Law, though it is God's law and
word, do not aid us in justification. Using Abraham as an
example, he argues that Abraham was so justified without works
that even the highest work, which had been commanded by God, over
and above all others, namely circumcision, did not aid him in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: interior, which is open to the sky, and grass and wild-flowers
rooting themselves into the chinks of the stones, look already
like relics of antiquity, and may yet be overspread with the
lichens of centuries to come. Others, where the limeburner still
feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford points of interest to
the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself on a log of wood
or a fragment of marble, to hold a chat with the solitary man. It
is a lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to thought,
may be an intensely thoughtful occupation; as it proved in the
case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such strange purpose, in
days gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was burning.
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the
country-side was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as if we
had been "in the swim" of society, when at length we reached the
point where the Riviere des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot
ladder of broken black rocks. There we pitched our tents in a
strip of meadow by the water-side, where we could have the sound of
the falls for a slumber-song all night and the whole river for a
bath at sunrise.
A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-
cup in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles
across country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked,
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