Love Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

The line sells an expansion of loyalty: start at home, then dissolve the boundaries of home entirely. Joseph Smith frames piety as an engine of outward motion, not private comfort. Love of God, in this construction, is measurable by restlessness. If you can sit still with your blessings, you have not been properly seized.

The intent is theological and organizational at once. It takes a familiar Christian ideal (charity) and weaponizes it against parochial religion. “Not content” is the pressure point: contentment becomes a moral failure, a sign of spiritual smallness. The sentence flatters the believer’s sense of grandeur while quietly issuing a marching order. It’s less a meditation than a recruitment pitch for a faith that, in Smith’s lifetime, had to justify its aggressive missionary posture and constant relocation under persecution and political hostility.

Subtext matters here. “A man” is doing the ranging; the vision is masculine, public, and expansive, mapping spiritual authority onto movement, travel, and leadership. Family remains the baseline unit of righteousness, but it’s also treated as insufficient. That’s a delicate rhetorical move for a 19th-century American religious leader: honor domestic virtue, then insist that true devotion must exceed it.

Historically, it fits a young, fast-growing movement trying to become more than a sect. Universal language (“the whole world,” “the whole human race”) isn’t just idealism; it’s a claim to legitimacy. If your message is for everyone, you’re not merely another upstart church - you’re history arriving on schedule.