Subscribe to our RSS feed. Home About Diary of Daedalus Portal F.A.Q. Headlines Hot Links Posts Special Reports First time visitor? Learn more. The Longest Sentence Ever Written by savage ( 29 Comments › ) Filed under History at April 15th, 2010 - 7:00 am I thought this would be something everyone might be interested in and it comes from the American Digest. Anyone that is an actual thinker and not some nitwit that fell off a turnip wagon might get a kick out of it. This is the Nineteenth Century in one sentence. That’s right, ONE sentence. Apparently, it is the longest legitimate sentence ever written in a book. It was written by Cushing Biggs Hassell’s in his thousand-page History of the Church of God, published in 1886. hat tip to rickl “The nineteenth is the century of the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, in a long series of bloody and demoralizing European wars ; the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire by the Greek Revolution, and of the Spanish Empire by that of Mexico and South America; the repeated revolutions in France; the War of 1813 between England and the United States; the War between the United States and Mexico; the War between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union; the unification of Germany, and that of Italy; the numerous wars of England the most warlike, self-aggrandizing, wealthy and powerful nation of modern times), for the maintenance and increase of her empire and claims, -among which contest* should be particularized her wars in 1839-1842, to force the impious opium trade, and missions incidentally, upon China—in 1840, with her allies, to reconquer Syria for the Turks from a rebellious vassal, just as England has repeatedly upheld the Turks in their frightful and wholesale massacres of “Christians” in the Turkish Empire and Asiatic provinces—in 1854-6, in connection with France and Sardinia, to defend Turkey from Russia—in 1857, to preserve her dominion in India from the Sepoy rebellion—in 1857-1860, to open China better to trade and missions—and in 1883, to take possession of Egypt, and foreclose, at the mouth of cannon and rifle, her mortgage on that abject and impoverished people, and to defend her shares in the Suez Canal and her shortest route to India; the course of England, during recent years, in forcing, by her fleets and treaties, the wretched liquor traffic upon India, Shun, Madagascar, Griqualand, etc., degrading the heathens far below their former ■condition, in order to increase her revenue; the apparent and temporary recognition, by the European nations, of a special and merciful and almighty Providence in staying the victorious career of Napoleon Bonaparte, followed by their speedy relapse into infidelity; the almost universal emancipation of slaves, and the very extensive liberation of civilized peoples from political oppression; the improvement of the manners of general society—less open indecency, intemperance, profanity and dueling; the milder character of legislation; the increase of charities and asylums for the afflicted and unfortunate; the great extension of popular education; the unprecedented progress of scientific discoveries and practical inventions, lightening physical labor, and multiplying the conveniences, comforts and luxuries of life; the discovery and mining of gold in California and Australia; the establishment of manufactures, and great increase of commerce, and excessive devotion to business and money-getting; the rapid increase of wealth, and pauperism, and demoral i/at inn, and, in most civilized countries, of recent crime; morbid sympathy for and condoning of wrong-doing; the general prevalence of quackery, puffery and dishonesty; unparalleled adulterations of foods, and drinks and medicines; the increased licentiousness of theatrical performances ; the great increase of gambling in old and new forms, including speculation in grain and cotton futures; the gradual but steady decay of the appreciation of the life-long sacredness of the marriage relation, the relaxation of the laws of divorce, and the alarming multiplication of divorces and of ” consecutive polygamy ” (the New England States of the Union occupying a miserable pre-eminence, and Protestant countries far surpassing Roman Catholic countries, in this corrupting disregard of the Divine law of marriage); the increasing frequency of obf oatation and foeticide, in place of infanticide practiced by the Pagans; the recent increasing corruption of the daily press, in the large cities, and of the use of the telegraph, expatiating upon all the details of crime, and thus helping to make crime epidemic; the infidel tendency of a large body of periodical literature and of science falsely so called; the impurity and corrupting influence of much of modern art; the fact that the nationsof Europe spend, on an average, four and a half times more for war than for education—that England spends about twenty dollars per year for every man, woman and child, for spirituous liquors, and that the United States spends about seventeen dollars annually per capita for the same purpose, while spending for each inhabitant only about one dollar annually for religion and about two dollars for education ;* the great increase of insanity and idiocy ; the disruption of the Roman Catholic communion (the Old Catholics, in Europe, seceding in 1870)—the Episcopalian (the Reformed branch, in the United States, going off in 1873)—the Presbyterian (the Cumberland or Arminian Presbyterians, in the western and southwestern States of the Union, withdrawing from their Calvinistic brethren in 1810; the Free Church, in Scotland, from the Established Church, in 1843; the New School, in the United States, separating from the Old School in 1837, but re-uniting in 1860; and the Southern separating from the Northern in 1861)—the Baptist (the Old School, in the United States, separating from the New School in 1828-43 ; and the New School separating into Northern and Southern in 1845; the Strict Baptists, in England, separating from the Particular Baptists in 1835)—the Methodist (dividing into about a dozen sects; and, in the United States, separating into Northern and Southern in 1844)—and the Society of Friends (some Quakers, in Ireland, becoming heterodox in 1813; and the Hicksite, in the United States, withdrawing from the old Orthodox Quakers in 1827); a very extensive decay of their ancient faith among Jews, Brahmins, Buddhists, Mohammedans and Protestants (the latter almost universally abandoning their original Calvinism for Catholic Arminianism, and many going off even into Pelagianism and Universalism); the decayed and deadened condition of Greek Catholicism ; the rigorous revival and blasphemous culmination of Koman Catholicism (Ultramontauism), regaining a significance and influence such as it had not had for centuries (the deadly wound being healed), in the re-establishment of Jesuitism and the Inquisition (1814)—the murder ofttco hundred female and nearly two thousand male Protestants in Southern France (1815)—the re-invigoration of the Propaganda Society (1817)—the founding of the Lyons Propagation Society (1822) and of numerous Colleges and Theological Seminaries—the renewed ardor of a large number of old Catholic Societies—the purchase, by the “Society for the Holy Childhood of Jesus,” of about 400,000 Chinese orphan children, at about three cents apiece, in order to bring up and *’ baptize ” them in the Catholic communion, and the purchase of numerous pretended conversions from the lower classes of Protestants in Europe —the gathering in of thousands from the Episcopalians in England, and the very rapid increase of their numbers, in the United States, from immigration—the sending out of three thousand priests on foreign mission work, disseminating, among the heathens, the most corrupting Jesuitical casuistry and idolatry in the name of Christianity, and, at times, especially in remote islands, the most shameless French licentiousness, worse than that previously practiced by the heathens themselves— the affirmation, by Pope Pius IX., in 1854, of the sinlessness (Immaculate conception) of the Virgin Mary, “the Mother of Got!, and the Queen of Heaven” (thus still more than ever justifying and encouraging the increasing Roman Catholic Mariolatry, or idolatrous worship of Mary,