Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Grace, in William Ames's telling, is not a mist that floats over a person; it's a regime that reorganizes them from the inside out. The line builds a clear hierarchy: the soul gets renovated first, the body follows, and the entire human being becomes a single instrument of obedience. That sequencing matters. Ames is writing in a Reformed, post-Reformation world where the big anxiety is not whether religion is lofty, but whether it is real - durable enough to show up in habits, appetites, and ordinary conduct without collapsing into either moralism or mysticism.

The phrasing "most appropriately in the soul" is doing quiet polemical work. It guards against a purely external Christianity, the kind measured by gestures and compliance, by insisting that grace is first an inward transformation. Yet Ames refuses the opposite escape hatch: a privatized spirituality that treats the body as incidental, or worse, irredeemable. His claim that the body is "capable of the same obedience" is a theological rebuke to any tendency to quarantine faith in the mental or emotional sphere.

Subtextually, this is also discipline literature. In early modern Protestant cultures, the body was where belief could be tested: work, sex, fasting, speech, leisure. Ames gives that scrutiny a consoling frame. Obedience is not mere self-control; it's the downstream effect of grace working through the will. The result is a comprehensive anthropology: no part of the person gets to opt out, and no part is written off as beyond repair.