St. Augustine, who was trained in the heights of the Latin rhetorical tradition, found Scripture rhetorically primitive when he was looking at it from the outside, before his conversion. But he became far more impressed with the rhetorical power of both the Old and the New Testaments once he began to grasp their inner meaning. There are in fact many different rhetorical flourishes in Scripture, and some of the most satisfying of them employ what we might call “sequences” of various kinds. Indeed, rhetorical sequences seem to play an important role in most languages—such as the common habit of ending a speech with a triad of phrases, as Abraham Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.
VEYM LEAGUE OF CHAPTERS
