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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: Italian opera, their tragedy, their dancers; in short, all their
drama. The performance of Mysteries was a later thing than these
spiritual disputations, to which, perhaps, we owe the French stage.
Inspired eloquence, combining the attractions of the human voice
skilfully used, with daring inquisition into the secrets of God,
sufficed to satisfy every form of curiosity, appealed to the soul, and
constituted the fashionable entertainment of the time. Not only did
Theology include the other sciences, it was science itself, as grammar
was science to the Ancient Greeks; and those who distinguished
themselves in these duels, in which the orators, like Jacob, wrestled
with the Spirit of God, had a promising future before them. Embassies,
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