Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Fosdick flips the usual religious posture on its head: faith isn’t a bunker, it’s a lever. The line rejects the pious romance of endurance - the idea that virtue is mainly about surviving modernity with your beliefs intact. Even “profit by it” gets dismissed as too small, too transactional, too compatible with complacency. His real target is the respectable church that prides itself on being “relevant” only after the world has already moved.

As a mainline Protestant clergyman speaking in the early 20th century, Fosdick is writing from the fault line of the modernist-fundamentalist crisis, when science, industrial capitalism, urban life, and new social movements were forcing American religion to choose: fight the age or translate the gospel into it. The quote’s intent is a rallying cry for the Social Gospel impulse - Christianity as public action, not private consolation. If salvation is only personal, change becomes something you “endure.” If discipleship is social, change becomes something you initiate.

The subtext is a gentle but firm rebuke to congregations that confuse stability with holiness. “Cause it” assigns agency and responsibility: Christians aren’t merely subjects of history, they’re moral actors accountable for the shape of society. It also smuggles in a modern confidence about progress - a belief that transformation can be guided, not just feared.

Rhetorically, the sentence climbs in three steps, each one narrowing the moral escape hatch. You can’t settle for resilience. You can’t settle for adaptation. The only faithful stance, Fosdick insists, is leadership.