/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6717283]

So I attend a major american Catholic university and tend to spend a lot of time in the lower stacks of the library going through weird religious books. The following, from the late 18th century, is from a primer on preaching directed at an audience of Anglican country parsons.

When, in the course of one’s formulation of a carefully compiled fragment of public oratory for presentation among the educated milieu, he feels the life-blood, which heretofore made its normal and much desired passage throughout the veins ensconcing his unmentionable bits, begin to overstay, at least in part, its welcome among the aforementioned parts which Adam deigned to cover at the dawn of his sin, the resultant swelling produced, the base offspring of some stray fragment of uncoordinated thought, turned (as they so oft’ do in these wretched times) towards the production of an impromptu and unabashedly lustful dumb-show within the mind, utterly wanting in wit, correct structure, or any of the goodly number of elements, the delicately managed combination thereof resulting, God willing, in a suitable piece of instructive poesy, which in its noblest and most incorruptible form inevitably shall bring due glory to King and Country, he should, in manner and practice bend every effort toward the reigning in of such stray thoughts so as not to reveal to his audience--if that portion of his person most physically altered by such idle wanderings (surely the devil’s tool if ever there was) has not the fortune of the relative protection of a podium or other structure which could possibly obfuscate the vision--the evidence of his private infraction, that will, if he proves himself able of properly countenancing the sundry phantasms of his mind, in the due course of time find itself slowly disengaged from that particular state in which Nature decreed it would be most suitable for that task, known to Christian men of our nation but unspoken of by that token of grace what sets us apart from the savage Mohameteans and sundry other heathen peoples, which has the sole purpose, apart from the vice and idleness in which men and women of sin partake of its grave and damnable misuse, of propagating the race as the Lord has instructed us to do since the time of Abram, the accomplishment thereof effected through the complete turning of his mind away from sin and vice and toward peaceable reflection upon ecclesiastical matters or perhaps one of the compositions of good Saint Paul on the teachings of the Apostles (the more fortunate reflection thereunto being all the more expediently accomplished should he already have been carrying goodly discourse upon such matters) but not that Song of Solomon,

(1/2 because it's all one long fucking sentence)

[Anonymous No.6717286]

>>6717283 (2/2) in which may be found a clever metaphor of relations between Christ and Church that the minds of fallen Man have subverted and taken for a song of praise to certain practices, already mentioned and noted by the Christian reader, which bear the sole purpose of matters related to the conception and birthing of sound babes, always to be silent in their obedience and mindful of their studies of the teachings of Our Lord and those blessed souls, who, in their collective state of divine illumination, have been graced with the token fortune of entering into a state of moral certitude in which, as Grace so has it, of countenancing the Godhead via the scriptures and due reflection thereto.

[Anonymous No.6717323]

Source?