Here is a question: the classics of Christian literature over the last 1800 years or so—a bunch of old, dusty books or great and profound Christian thought that we should not ignore? Of course, there is some of both. Opinions will vary, but the very best of them is so great that we are poorer for not having at least “picked up the crumbs under the table.” Moreover, they have such value because they are the product of the work of the Holy Spirit in the church age. Over the last twenty-five years, I have gathered several thousand quotations from these, in many cases, almost forgotten works, and I have doled them out through a service called The Christian Quotation of the Day. This has given me a chance to examine them closely. Many of the fine, memorable quotations employ vivid figures of speech, such as parallelism, symmetrical patterns in successive phrases that imitate each other. These parallelisms come in many flavors: synonymous, antithetical, inverted, and reversed as in a chiasm, a figure that abounds in Scripture. Consider some examples:

_ Robert McAnally Adams is a retired mathematician and curator of The Christian Quotation of the Day. See cqod.com