Time & Perspective Quote by Archibald Alexander

The line is a pastoral ambush of perfectionism. Alexander doesn’t flatter the listener’s moral aspirations; he disarms them. “Do not for a moment suppose” is the rhetorical equivalent of taking someone gently by the shoulders and interrupting a spiraling inner monologue: stop rehearsing, stop bargaining, stop polishing yourself into eligibility. The sentence targets a very specific religious pathology - treating faith like an admissions process, where self-improvement functions as an unofficial prerequisite to grace.

Its intent is immediate: move the anxious, self-scrutinizing hearer from delay to decision. “Prepare your heart for a worthy reception” sounds pious, but Alexander exposes it as a sophisticated form of avoidance. Underneath, it’s also a rebuke to spiritual consumer culture before the term existed: the idea that you must curate the right emotional state, the right sincerity, the right moral momentum, then Christ will be available. Alexander insists the offer precedes the makeover.

Context matters. As a leading American Presbyterian in the early republic, Alexander lived amid revival currents and their aftershocks, when conversion narratives could become performances of intensity and readiness. His phrase “come at once” answers both the revivalist pressure to do something now and the Reformed insistence that salvation is not earned. He threads the needle: urgency without meritocracy.

The subtext is both comforting and confrontational. Comforting because it removes the crushing demand to self-rescue; confrontational because it strips away the last respectable excuse for postponement. “Come as you are” isn’t sentimental permissiveness here. It’s a theological refusal to let shame masquerade as humility, and a demand that the needy stop trying to look less needy before asking for bread.