Faith & Spirit Quote by Adam Clarke

A swipe at “papists” is doing more than sectarian name-calling here; it’s a diagnostic tool for Adam Clarke’s Protestant imagination. He casts Roman Catholics as missing a supposedly obvious spiritual mechanic: sin as a kind of infection that clings to the soul because the soul is tethered to flesh. The punchline is severe. If moral evil is “detained” by embodiment, then the body isn’t just the site of temptation; it’s a holding cell. You don’t merely repent your way out. You die.

Clarke’s wording is almost juridical and medical at once: detained, dissolution, contagion. That blend is strategic. It makes doctrine feel like anatomy and public health, not merely interpretation. Moral failure becomes something transmissible and persistent, a condition that can’t be fully cured while the soul remains physically networked to the corruptible body. The subtext is a defense of a particular Protestant account of sanctification and final purification: whatever grace accomplishes in life, complete cleansing arrives only when the body-soul connection breaks.

The anti-Catholic edge matters in Clarke’s era, when British Protestantism often defined itself by contrasting “biblical” clarity with Catholic “error.” By insisting “even papists could not see,” Clarke flatters his in-group as spiritually literate while framing doctrinal disagreement as perceptual blindness. It’s polemic with a metaphysical payoff: the quote turns mortality into theology’s final instrument, the last necessary surgery separating soul from the stubbornly compromising material world.