Wit & Attitude Quote by William Gurnall

Cosmic sabotage is the fantasy Gurnall refuses to entertain. His line turns apocalyptic anxiety into a kind of rhetorical joke: hell can scheme, earth can riot, but God is so unbothered that not even His hand trembles. It’s an intentionally physical image, almost domestic in scale, shrinking demonic “plots” down to the level of a failed attempt to jostle a writer at his desk. The effect is pastoral and polemical at once: reassurance for the frightened, humiliation for the forces they fear.

The phrasing “spoil one letter or line” does heavy theological work. Gurnall isn’t promising that believers won’t suffer; he’s promising that suffering cannot edit the divine manuscript. Providence, in this view, isn’t improvisational or reactive. It’s already composed, inked, and immune to interruption. That’s why “drawing” matters: God is depicted as an artisan steadily sketching history, not a ruler scrambling to maintain control.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in 17th-century England, amid civil war aftershocks, sectarian churn, plague years, and a culture saturated with talk of Satan’s activity, Gurnall offers a counter-psychology. Stop treating chaos as evidence of God’s fragility. The subtext is a rebuke to spiritual paranoia and political panic alike: you can be surrounded by commotion and still refuse the story that the universe is slipping. The sentence is meant to stabilize the reader’s nerves by making their biggest fear look, frankly, small.