Daily Inspiration Quote by J. G. Stedman

Stedman’s line is a soldier’s diagnosis of social psychology, delivered with the bleak economy of someone who’s watched ideology turn into bloodshed. The pivot is the word “mad”: first, madness as surplus faith (the Crusades), then madness as deficit (“for want of it”). It’s not nostalgia for medieval piety so much as a grim symmetry: humans will organize themselves around an absolute, and if religion stops supplying the absolute, something else will rush in to do the job.

Calling the Crusaders “religious mad” strips away the romance of holy war and reframes it as mass possession. Then Stedman turns the blade toward his own era. The late 18th century is the age of Enlightenment self-confidence, but also of political upheaval, imperial violence, and the early tremors of revolutionary fervor. His subtext is that secular rationality doesn’t automatically make people calm or humane; it may simply leave a vacuum where meaning used to be, a vacuum that can be filled by nationalism, ideology, commercial appetite, or the performative moral causes of the day.

The sentence works because it refuses comforting progress narratives. It’s a compact warning against thinking history “grew out of” fanaticism. Stedman implies we didn’t outgrow it; we just changed the costume. In two clauses, he sketches a cycle of appetite: the craving for a total explanation, a sanctified mission, an excuse to be extreme. The soldier’s eye is practical: take away the old banner and the march still continues.