The Long Slavery

“For centuries one of the problems with rhetoric as it was practiced in the classical world was that it all too often served no purpose quite so clearly as the glorification of the orator . . . The purpose, the end, of rhetoric had a way of getting lost under the techniques. When rhetoric was made the servant of the Word, the ancient art was freed from its long slavery to egotism” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. II, p. 46).