Daily Inspiration Quote by Tryon Edwards

Credulity, in Tryon Edwards's framing, isn’t a harmless softness of heart; it’s an ethical and intellectual failure with a paper-thin alibi. The sentence is built like a tightening noose: “slight evidence” is already a warning, but Edwards doesn’t stop there. He pushes the reader down a gradient from weak support to none at all, then past the cliff edge: “against evidence.” That escalation matters. It turns credulity from simple naivete into willful defiance of reality, suggesting that some beliefs aren’t merely unproven but actively maintained as a kind of stubborn self-soothing.

As a 19th-century theologian, Edwards is writing in a period when “belief” is a contested public category. Protestant culture prized faith, but modernity was arriving with its audits: science, higher biblical criticism, newspapers, reform movements, new sects, new scams. His definition protects a boundary: faith may be virtuous, but credulity is not. The subtext is pastoral and political at once. He’s warning congregants that not every conviction deserves respect just because it’s sincerely held, and he’s warning public life that communities can be manipulated when they treat suspicion as cynicism and verification as impiety.

The line works because it refuses the comforting confusion between openness and gullibility. Credulity isn’t portrayed as extra belief; it’s belief detached from responsibility. Edwards makes the standard brutally simple: evidence counts, and the refusal to reckon with it is not innocence - it’s a choice.