Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Rainy

Respectability is doing a lot of theological work here. Rainy is naming the moment when Christianity stops being a minority identity defined by refusal and starts becoming a majority culture that can afford to make peace with the world it once shunned. The phrase "could not but arise" is a quiet shrug of inevitability: once a faith becomes socially dominant, it develops an internal pressure to stop looking so inconvenient. The early Christians "recoiled" not because they were naturally joyless, but because recoil was a boundary-making act - a way to signal allegiance in a society whose entertainments, occupations, and civic rituals were braided into pagan power. Renunciation functioned as social insulation.

Rainy, a 19th-century Scottish clergyman writing in an era of established churches and expanding bourgeois leisure, is reading that shift with controlled ambivalence. He doesn't thunder about decadence; he diagnoses a "tendency", almost like a sociologist. Yet the subtext is clear: "reconcile with Christian profession" hints at moral bookkeeping - keeping the label while renegotiating the lifestyle. "Good many modes of life" is deliberately expansive, suggesting not just obvious vices but the entire texture of social participation: what you do for a living, where you spend your evenings, which public ceremonies you treat as harmless.

The sentence works because it treats accommodation as both understandable and spiritually risky. Rainy is warning his own Christian culture that compromise rarely arrives as a dramatic betrayal; it arrives as normalization. When faith becomes an identity you can wear without friction, the hard edges that once made it distinctive get sanded down - and the sanding feels like progress.