Faith & Spirit Quote by John Keble

The line cuts with the quiet audacity of a confession: prayer is not the hard part. John Keble, an Anglican priest writing in a century of public piety and private compromise, aims the knife at the most comfortable religious habit of all - treating devotion as a substitute for change. "This and every day" refuses the one-time epiphany. It imagines faith as a daily practice measured in small, repeatable acts, not a mood or a Sunday performance.

The genius is in the phrase "more nearly". Keble sidesteps the brittle perfectionism that can turn religion into theater and replaces it with a humbler, more demanding standard: incremental alignment. You can always move closer. That also means you can never claim you're done. The subtext is moral realism - the speaker assumes drift, distraction, and self-justification are default settings. The prayer asks for help not to feel devout, but to become coherent.

Context matters: Keble is often linked to the Oxford Movement, which pushed Anglicanism toward seriousness, discipline, and continuity with older Christian traditions. In that atmosphere, ritual could become either a deeper formation or a refined cover for inertia. This line safeguards against the latter. It insists that the truest test of prayer is not eloquence but resemblance: do your choices look like your words? It's a rebuke delivered as a plea, which is why it lands. It doesn't accuse the reader from above; it implicates everyone from within.