Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Inglis

Inglis writes like a man watching the moral weather turn and deciding it needs a sermon, fast. The capital-P “Passions,” the almost anatomical “of the Soul,” the melodramatic stack of “dark, malevolent” all do the same work: they frame political upheaval as spiritual infection. This isn’t merely description; it’s triage. He’s telling his audience that whatever cause is inflaming their neighbors (and tempting them) doesn’t just have bad outcomes, it rearranges the inner self, swapping out “mild and amiable affections” for something predatory.

The sentence is engineered as a moral cascade. First, the passions are “roused and exerted” (active verbs: the danger is kinetic). Then the virtues don’t simply weaken; they’re “suppressed,” and finally “laid prostrate,” a phrase that turns ethics into a body knocked flat. That physicality matters: Inglis wants vice to feel not like an idea but like a coup against the person you think you are. The implied target is collective anger - the intoxicating righteousness of crowds, factions, revolutions - which he treats as a technology for dissolving restraint.

As a clergyman in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, Inglis is also making a political intervention under religious cover. By casting civic conflict as the unleashing of “malevolent Passions,” he delegitimizes dissent without debating its claims. The subtext: disorder is not a policy disagreement; it’s a moral backslide, and the faithful should mistrust the thrill of grievance, especially when it demands that “amiable affections” (sympathy, neighborliness, deference) be sacrificed on the altar of a cause.