Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Brooks

Brooks takes a wrecking ball to the flattering story we tell about ourselves: that good deeds stay good simply because they look good. In one line, he reframes heroism as a potential spiritual counterfeit. The phrase "most glorious actions" sets a trap for vanity, then snaps shut with "but glorious sins" - not petty wrongdoing, but sin dressed in its Sunday best. The bite is in the motive. If the end point is self-manufacture ("he hath made himself") rather than God, the deed becomes spiritually inverted: outwardly radiant, inwardly corrupt.

This is classic Puritan moral psychology, obsessed less with public performance than with the hidden engine of desire. Brooks writes in a world where religious life is constantly threatened by hypocrisy, not just the obvious kind but the respectable kind: charity for applause, piety as branding, discipline as social proof. His target isn't action; it's self as the final audience. The sentence effectively relocates morality from the visible act to the invisible telos. You can feed the poor and still be negotiating for status, safety, or self-justification.

The subtext is bracingly anti-modern: your intentions are not automatically trustworthy, and your inner narrative is not a neutral space. Brooks implies that the self is a factory of plausible excuses, able to sanctify ego with sanctimony. Read now, it lands like an early critique of virtue-signaling and personal legacy culture, except the stakes aren't optics but the soul. The line doesn't flatter our goodness; it interrogates the need to be seen as good at all.