Time & Perspective Quote by Frederick William Faber

Faber’s line treats morality less like a grand, cinematic showdown and more like a long war of inches. “Every moment” is the tell: holiness isn’t reserved for rare heroics, it’s built in the small spans of time where desire presses and you don’t yield. The genius is its scale. By shrinking the battlefield to the instant, Faber makes virtue accessible to ordinary people while also making it relentless. You don’t get to “win” once; you have to keep winning, minute by minute.

The word “resistance” matters, too. He’s not promising the disappearance of temptation, or a serene, perfected self. He assumes the opposite: temptation is durable, recurring, and intimate. The subtext is Augustinian and pastoral: you are not shocked by your own impulses; you expect them, you name them, and you practice counter-habits. That framing quietly shifts the emotional register from shame to discipline. If the struggle is normal, then the person struggling isn’t uniquely broken.

Context sharpens the intent. Faber, a 19th-century English convert to Catholicism and a leading Oratorian voice, wrote for a culture anxious about respectability, self-control, and spiritual “seriousness.” His sentence sounds like comfort, but it’s also an organizing principle: moral life as daily training rather than occasional repentance. The payoff is motivational and political in the broad sense - it builds a community of people who see private restraint as meaningful action, a string of invisible victories that, in his theology, echoes into eternity.