In this pattern of balance, various elements are used in the offsettings. Thus when one attends closely to the meanings of the balanced parts, one finds these compounds recurring: an abstract statement is balanced (in a second independent clause) by a more concrete expression of the same thing; a fact is balanced by its causal explanation; a statement of positive mode is balanced by one of negative mode; a clause of praise is balanced by a clause of qualified censure; a description of one part is balanced by a description of a contrasting part, and so on through a good many conventional pairings. Now in these collocations cause and effect and other relationships are presented, yet the attempt seems not so much to explore reality as to clothe it in decent form. Culture is a delicate reconciliation of opposites, and consequently a man who sees the world through the eyes of a culture makes effort in this direction. We know that the world of Eighteenth century culture was a rationalist world, and in a rationalist world everything must be “accounted for.” The virtue of the compound sentence is that its second part gives “the other half,” so to speak. As the pattern works out, every fact has its cause; every virtue is compensated for by a vice; every excursion into generality must be made up for by attention to concrete circumstances and vice versa. The perfection of this art form is found in Johnson and Gibbon, where such pairings occur with a frequency which has given rise to the phrase “the balanced style.” When Gibbon, for example, writes of religion in the Age of the Antonines: “The superstition of the people was not embittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system,”[121] we have almost the feeling that the case of religion has been settled by this neat artifice of expression. This is a “just” view of affairs, which sees both sides and leaves a kind of balanced account. It looks somewhat subjective, or at least humanized; it gives us the gross world a little tidied up by thought. Often, moreover, this balance of structure together with the act of saying a thing equivocally—in the narrower etymological sense of that word—suggests the finality of art. This will be found true of many of the poetical passages of the King James Bible, although these come from an earlier date. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork”; “Man cometh forth as a flower and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.” By thus stating the matter in two ways, through balanced clauses, the sentence achieves a degree of formal completeness missing in sentences where the interest is in mere assertion. Generally speaking the balanced compound sentence, by the very contrivedness of its structure, suggests something formed above the welter of experience, and this form, as we have by now substantially said, transfers something of itself to the meaning.