Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Traherne

A blank book, for Traherne, isn’t a lack; it’s a moral and metaphysical opportunity. The image of “an infant’s soul” does double duty: it evokes innocence and radical openness, but it also sneaks in an anxiety about formation. If anything may be written, then someone will write. That “capable of all things” is exhilarating, and faintly coercive. The cleric’s hand hovers over the page the way a culture hovers over a child: ready to inscribe.

Traherne’s wording is deliberately old-scriptural (“containeth”), borrowing the cadence of the King James Bible to give his private project the gravity of revelation. Yet the humility is performative. Calling the book “empty” frames what follows as a kind of creation story, with the author cast as steward of potential, not just a maker of sentences. He doesn’t want to fill it with “wonders” alone, but “profitable wonders” - marvels that pay rent. Pleasure must justify itself as spiritual yield.

The context matters: Traherne writes in the wake of England’s religious upheavals, when the fight wasn’t only over doctrine but over who gets to shape minds. His fascination with childhood innocence, so strong throughout his work, becomes a critique of jaded adulthood and a bid to recover “first thoughts” before they harden into cynicism or sectarian habit.

The subtext is a quiet argument about education, devotion, and authorship: emptiness is not neutral. It’s the raw material of salvation - or of capture - depending on whose “mind” gets there first.