Faith & Spirit Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A sentence like this lands with the hard snap of moral certainty: not persuasion, but warning. Hammon doesn’t argue that stealing or infidelity are socially corrosive; he invokes a cosmic enforcement mechanism. “But this will not do” sounds almost domestic, the mild scolding that precedes discipline. Then the stakes spike: God “will certainly punish you.” That adverb is doing heavy work. It shuts down loopholes, bargaining, the hope that the world is random or that power can buy impunity.

Hammon’s context makes the line throb with contradiction. An enslaved Black poet writing in Christian moral language has to navigate an impossible terrain: a religion used to justify bondage, and a religious vocabulary that also offered literacy, communal life, and an alternative court of appeal when earthly courts were rigged. The subtext is less “behave” than “there is a justice you cannot bribe.” It’s a way to speak about accountability in a society structured to deny it.

The pairing of “stealing” and “being unfaithful” is telling. One is a crime, the other a betrayal; one policed by law, the other by community shame. Hammon folds both into the same moral ledger, implying that private conduct and public harm share a single spiritual consequence. Depending on audience, that can read as conservative discipline or as strategic leverage: if the world refuses to punish exploitation, a higher tribunal will. The line’s power is its cold clarity - a theology turned into a pressure point.