"A prosperous state makes a secure Christian, but adversity makes him Consider"
About this Quote
Prosperity, Bradstreet suggests, is a spiritual sedative. It doesn’t make you faithless; it makes you comfortable enough to stop interrogating yourself. The line lands with a Puritan’s blunt clarity: security produces a “secure Christian” in the worst sense - not safe in God, but sealed off from doubt, urgency, and self-scrutiny. “Secure” carries a double edge, implying both stability and complacency, the moral nap that arrives when the pantry is full and the roof doesn’t leak.
Adversity, by contrast, doesn’t simply “test” belief; it forces the believer to consider. That capital-C “Consider” is doing quiet heavy lifting. It’s not just reflection, but a mandated practice in Puritan life: the disciplined audit of motives, sins, and dependence on grace. Hardship becomes a kind of theology tutor, dragging the mind back to first principles. Bradstreet’s craft lies in the compression: one clause sketches the entire Puritan suspicion of ease, the other converts suffering into spiritual attention.
The context matters. Bradstreet wrote as a colonial woman and a poet inside a culture that prized providential interpretation: illness, fire, failed harvests weren’t random; they were messages to decode. Her intent isn’t misery for misery’s sake, but an argument against the spiritual anesthesia of “prosperous” living. Subtext: if your faith feels effortless, that may be the problem. Comfort can imitate conviction. Adversity, for all its brutality, at least makes you honest.
Adversity, by contrast, doesn’t simply “test” belief; it forces the believer to consider. That capital-C “Consider” is doing quiet heavy lifting. It’s not just reflection, but a mandated practice in Puritan life: the disciplined audit of motives, sins, and dependence on grace. Hardship becomes a kind of theology tutor, dragging the mind back to first principles. Bradstreet’s craft lies in the compression: one clause sketches the entire Puritan suspicion of ease, the other converts suffering into spiritual attention.
The context matters. Bradstreet wrote as a colonial woman and a poet inside a culture that prized providential interpretation: illness, fire, failed harvests weren’t random; they were messages to decode. Her intent isn’t misery for misery’s sake, but an argument against the spiritual anesthesia of “prosperous” living. Subtext: if your faith feels effortless, that may be the problem. Comfort can imitate conviction. Adversity, for all its brutality, at least makes you honest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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