Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Henry Parkhurst

Parkhurst’s line turns a word that often gets filed under feeling into a kind of mental bravery. “Faith” here isn’t soft-focus comfort; it’s “heroism,” a term with sweat and risk in it. And the arena isn’t the battlefield or the street, but “the intellect” - the mind as a place where courage is demanded, not assumed. The phrasing quietly rebukes two enemies at once: the sentimental religion that asks nothing of you beyond reassurance, and the smug rationalism that treats belief as a failure of nerve.

Parkhurst was a late-19th-century American clergyman famous for moral crusading, preaching into an era intoxicated by industry, scientific prestige, and a rising confidence that everything important could be measured. In that climate, faith could look like an outdated instinct. His counter-move is rhetorical jujitsu: he reframes belief as the harder choice, because it requires the mind to live with uncertainty, to act without full proof, to commit when the data runs out.

The subtext is also defensive, but in a savvy way. Parkhurst isn’t rejecting intellect; he’s recruiting it. He implies that doubt isn’t the only sophisticated posture - that there’s a kind of intellectual cowardice in endlessly postponing conviction under the banner of “being reasonable.” Faith, in his formulation, is not the absence of thought but thought pushed to the edge, where it has to decide what it’s for.