In Langston Hughes essay “Salvation” he talks about a childhood experience and how it affected his life after on. He definitely used a pathos appeal to attract church followers who in my opinion were most likely questioning their faith about a higher being in the sky, who –if you pray and believe hard enough- you can “see” and be “saved” by him.
Now of course one can’t merely see a divine entity, in my opinion each person has a different view of what that divine and celestial “God” looks and acts like. However for Hughes he was wishing to actually “see” Jesus instead of the belief that Jesus was there and he could be saved by him just by going to the altar so they could“…to bring young lambs to the fold” (Hughes, 169) which meant to bring the sinners to “Jesus” so they could be saved.
I found it kind of ironic that Hughes used “lambs” as a term for sinners as lamb symbolically means the gentleness of character and patience under suffering, purity, meekness and sacrifice, and is also often borne as a symbol of Christ. This could just be a way for Hughes to draw his audience in and make them question the reasons for the whole idea of finding Jesus and actually seeing him to be saved from sin.
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