Pulpit coordination

1 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: rhetoric and persuasion · heresy and schism · faction, party, and civil strife · church rhetoric · christian preaching · censorship and the press

Usually: argument (1) · skepticism (1)

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 2 secondary

Edward Gibbon · Written 1782; revised 1845 (for the later edition context of the modern title page)
Chapter XVI: Conduct Towards The Christians, From Nero To > Chapter XX: Conversion Of Constantine.—Part IV. (5/9)

Gibbon critiques Christian preaching as a tool of mass emotion: bishops and presbyters address crowds, coordinated pulpit rhetoric spreads church doctrine and monastic ideals, and preaching can inflame heresy and sedition.

observes, that ancient Greece might perhaps contain fifteen or twenty *azyla* or sanctuaries; a number which at present may be found in Italy within the walls of a single city.] V. The bishop was the perpetual censor of the morals of his people The discipline of penance was digested into a system of canonical jurisprudence, 114 which accurately defined the duty of private or public confession, the rules of evidence,…