Teaching Christianity (continued)
clauses are best recited if the voice is slightly raised after the first two, and the period is brought to an end by dropping the voice at the third.
20. We come finally to what concludes all this: And they felt nothing for the grinding down of Joseph; it can be said in a continuous breath, as one clause, or more elegantly divided by a pause after and they felt nothing, and then with this distinction made, rounded off by for the grinding down of Joseph as a two-clause period. But in either case, it was an admirably charming touch that he did not say, "And they felt nothing for the grinding down of their brother," but instead of "their brother" put Joseph. In this way you could take any brother at all as being signified by the proper name of that one whose fame stood out among his brethren, whether in the evils he suffered at their hands or in the good he repaid them with.[24] Whether indeed this trope, by which we are led to understand any brother you like in Joseph, is propounded in that art of rhetoric which I both learned and taught, I do not know.[25] What a beautiful touch it is, though, and how it moves those who read and appreciate it, there is no point in anybody being told, if he cannot perceive it for himself.
21. And there are yet more things indeed, relating to the rules of eloquence, which can be discovered in this very same passage that we have presented as an example. But the good listener will not so much be instructed by its being diligently analyzed as fired by its being passionately recited. It was not, after all, composed by mere human industry, but it poured out as a divine message both wisely and eloquently from the prophet's mind, its wisdom not being preoccupied with eloquence, but its eloquence not withdrawing from wisdom. For if, as some of the most eloquent and percipient of men have been able to see and have said, things that appear to be learned in the art of oratory would never have been observed and noted down and put into form as this systematic doctrine, unless they had first been there in the