Faith & Spirit Quote by Donald Cargill

A man doesn’t list “reading and preaching” beside “wanderings, reproaches, and sufferings” unless he’s already living at the edge of the state’s patience. Donald Cargill, a Scottish Covenanter minister, is speaking from the gallows-adjacent world of late-17th-century repression, when loyalty to a Presbyterian church governance could be treated as sedition. The repeated “farewell” isn’t ornamental; it’s a litany, a deliberate stripping-away of attachments in public, so his death reads less like defeat and more like testimony.

The intent is twofold: spiritual accounting and political theater. By naming “relations and friends in Christ” before “acquaintances,” Cargill ranks allegiance: the religious community outranks blood and social ties, and the church outranks the crown that condemns him. The subtext is defiance without the swagger of defiance. He doesn’t hurl curses at persecutors; he exits by withdrawing consent, refusing to let the regime define what matters at the last moment.

The context sharpens the line “praying and believing.” Even faith is framed as an activity he must now relinquish in its earthly form, implying that the real continuation lies beyond the scaffold. That’s the rhetorical trick: the sentence performs a transfer of jurisdiction. Earthly pleasures, religious labor, even the humiliations of being hunted and slandered are demoted to temporary episodes. By cataloging them, he diminishes them. The state can end his life, but it cannot end the story he’s telling about it.