Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Milestone Planted: Address of Charles Francis Adams at Lincoln, Massachusetts, April 23, 1904, on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town
He, I admit, would be over bold who, standing, in this year' 1904, on the threshold of a century, should undertake to forecast the form of expression to which the century will, in its full maturity, addict itself; but I do not think it will be platform oratory. That was characteristic of the nineteenth century, as pulpit deliverance was characteristic of the eighteenth; and, speaking frankly as well as honestly, though not without study of both, I do not know which of the two modes of expression, taken as wholes, was the drearier and the emptier. The theological literature of the eighteenth century is vast, and, in largest part, devoid both of interest and value; but, on the other hand, retrospect reveals a shallowness and affectation of thought, combined with a tinsel of rhetoric, about the platform oratory of the nineteenth century, which goes far in a comparative way to a rehabilitation of what went before.
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