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If, Yes, and Perhaps; Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations, With Some Bits of Fact
If Yes and Perhaps Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations With Some Bits of Fact Author:Edward Everett Hale General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1876 Original Publisher: J.R. Osgood Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can sel... more »ect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE OLD AND THE NEW, FACE TO FACE. A THUMB-NAIL SKETCH. [this essay was published in Sartain's Magazine, in 1852, as " A Thumb-nail Sketch," having received one of ten premiums which Mr. Sartain offered to encourage young writers. Il had been written a few years earlier, some time before the studies of St. Paul's life by Conybeare and Howson, now so well known, were made public. The chronology of my essay does not precisely agree with that of these distinguished scholars. But I make no attempt now either to recast the essay or to discuss the delicate and complicated questions which belong to the chronology of Paul's life or to that of Nero; for there is no question with regard to the leading facts. At the end of twenty years I may again express the wish that some master competent to the greatest themes might take the trial of Paul as the subject of a picture.] In a Roman audienru-ehuiuber, the old civilization and the new civilization brought out, at the very birlh of the new, their chosen champions. In that little scene, as in one of Rembrandt's thumbnail studies for a great picture, the lights and shades are as distinct as they will ever be in the largest sceneof history. The champions were perfect representatives of the parties. And any man, with the soul of a man, looking on, could have prophesied the issue of the great battle from the issue of that contest. The old civilization of the Roman Empire, just at that time, had reached a point which, in all those outward forms which strike the eye, would regard aur times as mean indeed. It had palaces of marble, vhere...« less