Faith & Spirit Quote by Elizabeth Goudge

Goudge is arguing for a faith with scar tissue. Not the glossy, inherited kind that sits untouched on a shelf, but the kind that gets dragged through a sleepless night and still comes back in the morning. The line’s power is in its quiet reversal of what many religious cultures reward: certainty. She treats doubt not as a moral failure but as a crucible that burns off complacency. If faith has never been tested, it can remain a social habit, a family accent, a set of phrases you know when to say. Tested faith is chosen faith.

The wording does a lot of sly work. “Given back to us” suggests faith isn’t a possession we control; it’s something received, even re-granted, after the ego has exhausted itself. “Night of doubt” compresses a whole spiritual psychology into one domestic image: the dark hour where arguments don’t help, where you’re stuck with your fear, grief, or disappointment. That’s not the heroic doubt of intellectual posturing; it’s the ordinary, private kind that makes belief feel impossible.

Context matters: Goudge wrote in a 20th-century Britain rattled by war, loss, and modernity’s disenchantments. She’s speaking to readers who can’t afford naive optimism, yet don’t want cynicism as their final philosophy. The subtext is pastoral but unsentimental: if your faith has cracked, you’re not disqualified. You may be closer to something real than you were when belief came easily.