Daily Inspiration Quote by Bishop Robert South

Action, for Bishop Robert South, is not hustle culture; it is theology with teeth. The line comes out of a late-17th-century Anglican world where sermons weren’t just devotional pep talks but public arguments about what a human being is for. By calling action “the highest perfection,” South flips a common religious temptation: to equate holiness with withdrawal, contemplation, or tidy moral intention. He’s staking perfection on output, on agency, on a will made visible.

The phrasing does quiet ideological work. “Drawing forth” suggests something latent in human nature that only becomes real when it’s exercised, like a muscle. That’s a direct challenge to spiritual complacency: you don’t possess virtue as an ornament; you prove it as motion. The sentence is built like a staircase of escalating force - “power, vigor, and activity” - a triple beat that sounds almost martial. It’s meant to stir a listener out of pious self-regard and into a life where faith is legible.

Context matters: post-Civil War England was negotiating authority, duty, and social order, and Anglican preaching often reinforced a practical morality suited to a nation stabilizing itself. South’s definition of “man’s nature” also signals the period’s confident hierarchy: action is coded as masculine, public, consequential. Subtext: God’s image in you is not your capacity to feel correctly, but to do effectively. It’s a sanctification of work, responsibility, and measurable conduct - a religious argument for a life that leaves evidence.