Every popular
government has experienced the effects of rude or artificial eloquence. The coldest nature is animated, the firmest
reason is moved, by the rapid communication of the prevailing impulse, and each
hearer is affected by his own passions and by those of the surrounding
multitude. The ruin of civil liberty had
silenced the demagogues of Athens and the tribunes of Rome; the custom of
preaching, which seems to constitute a considerable part of Christian devotion,
had not been introduced into the temples of antiquity; and the ears of monarchs
were never invaded by the harsh sound of popular eloquence till the pulpits of
the empire were filled with sacred orators, who possessed some advantages
unknown to their profane predecessors.[1]
[1]Edward
Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. Ed. and Abridged Hans-Friedrich Mueller (New York: The Modern Library,
2003), p. 398, (Chapter XX). In this
Chapter on the Conversion of Constantine, Gibbon writes: “According to the
strictness of ecclesiastical language, the first of the Christian emperors was unworthy of the name till the moment of his
death.” (p. 376)
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