oulfis | (no subject)

I have been reading The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, and I'm currently dragging myself through a painfully dense and jargonistic chapter on religious debates that mean very little to me, and I was startled and alarmed by what seemed to be a colloquial sense of humour suddenly stuck into the middle of the following paragraph:

However close these doctrinal and devotional similarities, the two reli- gious phenomena diverged in precisely those areas most pregnant with polit- ical possibilities. To be sure, Pietists, like Jansenists, frequently appealed to the individual conscience or Gewissen and later evolved into ‘patriots’, but in Pietism’s case neither of these translated into adversarial politics. Unlike eighteenth-century Jansenism, which persisted in arguing Augustinian grace against Unigenitus, Pietism’s quarrel with Lutheran ‘orthodoxy’ was not really doctrinal. While Pietists may have wanted less emphasis on doctrine, they did not call for a different doctrine. Their de-emphasis of reason in favour of the heart gave Pietism the political consistency of pudding. That absence of polemical edge extended even to the domain of ecclesiology where, despite Spener’s inaugural condemnation of caesaropapism and a marked impatience with rigid hierarchicalism, Pietism did not really call for structural reform. Nothing in Pietism corresponds to Richerism or conciliarism.

I share basically so you can all sympathize with me that I am trying to make my way through this writing. Why is that the only sentence in 35 pages that seems like it was written by a human??