Daily Inspiration Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Mayhew is preemptively torching the most convenient weapon of the status quo: cynical relativism dressed up as prudence. He takes aim at a familiar dodge in political and religious debate: if a principle can be abused, then it must be unsafe to endorse. His sentence is built like a trap. He grants the premise for a beat, then flips it into an indictment of the people making the argument. If you reject every principle because it might be “wrested and perverted,” you end up with a world where power is the only surviving logic. That is not realism; it is surrender.

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. As a clergyman in the mid-18th century, Mayhew is speaking to a culture that treats “order” as a near-sacred good, and that often equates obedience with virtue. By locating distortion in “the weakness or wickedness of men,” he shifts blame away from principles themselves and toward moral agency. Principles don’t fail; people fail them. That matters because it preserves the legitimacy of ideals like liberty, conscience, and resistance to tyranny even when they are invoked hypocritically.

Context sharpens the edge: Mayhew became famous for sermons arguing that resistance to unjust rulers could be righteous, a startling claim in a British imperial world anxious about rebellion. This line is an argument for holding firm to first principles precisely because human beings are capable of bad faith. The possibility of abuse isn’t a reason to abandon moral standards; it’s the reason you need them.