Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Henry Parkhurst

Parkhurst pitches faith not as a blindfold but as an engine: intellect, but with wings. That metaphor is doing quiet polemical work. In an era when modern science and industrial modernity were increasingly cast as faith’s rivals, he refuses the binary. He makes belief a technology for thought, something that extends the mind’s range rather than replacing it. “Winged” implies lift, speed, and altitude - a way of seeing over the clutter of the immediate. Faith, in his framing, is cognition underwritten by confidence in meaning.

The second sentence sharpens into a theory of history with a moral edge. “Great workmen” is pointedly muscular and practical: not poets in a garret, but builders of institutions and movements. Parkhurst, famous for crusading against New York City corruption, had little patience for piety as private mood. He wants belief that moves into streets, courts, and legislatures. Calling them men who “believed like giants” isn’t mere boosterism; it’s a challenge to the timid, respectable religiosity that stays safely proportional. Giant belief licenses outsized action: reform that looks unreasonable until it wins.

There’s subtexted persuasion here: if you’re skeptical, you’re not being more rational, just less airborne. If you’re complacent, you’re not being prudent, just smaller. Parkhurst’s line compresses a whole Protestant civic ideal - faith as moral imagination plus stamina - and dares the reader to treat conviction as a public tool, not a private ornament.