Faith & Spirit Quote by James Prescott Joule

A Victorian scientist trying to reconcile the new physics with old pieties, Joule frames curiosity as a form of worship and, just as importantly, a form of discipline. The opening clause is doing social work: "knowledge of, and obedience to, the will of God" establishes orthodoxy before the real pitch begins. Once that deference is paid, the sentence swivels to its true ambition: the "next aim" is not prayer or charity but investigation. Science becomes a sanctioned second commandment.

Joule's language is tellingly managerial. "Aim" sounds like a program, not a mystical yearning. "Attributes" reduces God to properties, almost measurable ones: wisdom, power, goodness. Then comes the crucial bridge phrase: "as evidenced by His handiwork". Evidence is the scientist's keyword, smuggled into a devotional register. The world is presented as a legible artifact, and the faithful are implicitly tasked with reading it.

Context matters: Joule worked in the era when energy was being formalized, when the Industrial Revolution was remaking daily life, and when natural theology still offered a culturally respectable framework for inquiry. By casting nature as "handiwork", he taps a common Victorian compromise: you can pursue experimental rigor without sounding like you're undermining faith. The subtext is less humble than it appears. If God's goodness and power are "evidenced" in nature, then the laboratory becomes a privileged site of revelation, and the physicist a kind of authorized interpreter. This is science not in rebellion, but in coalition-building.