Faith & Spirit Quote by Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Bigotry isn’t just a moral stain in Chapin’s framing; it’s a self-inflicted spiritual injury. “Dwarfs the soul” is a deliberately physical verb for an inner condition, turning prejudice into a kind of malnutrition: you don’t merely hold a wrong view, you shrink your capacity to be fully human. That’s a shrewd move for a 19th-century clergyman speaking to an audience that prized “soul” as the seat of dignity and salvation. He’s not arguing policy first; he’s threatening the listener’s self-image.

The second half tightens the vice: “by shutting out the truth.” Bigotry, here, isn’t portrayed as an excess of conviction but as a refusal of reality. The subtext is epistemological and pastoral at once: prejudice thrives not because evidence is unclear, but because the bigot actively closes the blinds. It’s a rebuke to the comforting myth that moral error is innocent confusion. Chapin suggests it’s chosen blindness, a willful narrowing of what one can bear to see about other people, and about oneself.

Context matters. Chapin preached in an America racked by slavery, sectional conflict, and rising nativism. In that climate, calling bigotry “untrue” is a tactical escalation: it casts intolerance as a failure of reason and of faith, not merely a failure of kindness. He’s trying to make bigotry socially indefensible and spiritually costly, turning prejudice into a confession of smallness.