This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 Excerpt: ...and others kept clamoring for the publication of those talks. In 1726, all such persons were gratified. "A Complete Body of Divinity" is a vast book, in all senses; by no one to be trifled with. Let us salute it with uncovered heads. The attempted perusal of all these nine hundred and fourteen double-columned pages, ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 Excerpt: ...and others kept clamoring for the publication of those talks. In 1726, all such persons were gratified. "A Complete Body of Divinity" is a vast book, in all senses; by no one to be trifled with. Let us salute it with uncovered heads. The attempted perusal of all these nine hundred and fourteen double-columned pages, was, for many a theological scholar of the last century, a liberal education--and a training in every heroic and heavenly virtue. Along the pages of the venerable copy that I have used--the copy which Jeremiah Dummer, of the Middle Temple, London, sent over in 1727 as a gift to Yale College--I find fading memorials of the toil, and aspiration, and triumph, with which numerous worthy young divines of the last age grappled with the task of reading the book through; but on the blank leaf at the end, are only two inscriptions of final victory: "Lyman perlegit, 1742," and "Timothy Pitkin perlegit, A.D., 1765." Doubtless, both these heroes have long since had their reward, and have entered into rest, which they sorely needed; and the others perished by the way. The thought and expression of this literary mammoth are lucid, firm, close. The author moves over the great spaces of his subject with a calm and commanding tread, as of one well assured both of himself and of the ground he walked on. His object seemed to be, not merely to enlighten the mind, but to elevate the character and the life; and whenever, in the discussion of a topic, he has finished the merely logical process, he advances at once to the practical bearings of it, and urges upon his hearers the deductions of a moral logic, always doing this earnestly, persuasively, and in a kingly way. The whole effect is nutritious to brain and to moral sense; and the boo...
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