Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Simeon

Simeon opens with a question that isn’t really a question. It’s a spiritual trapdoor: agree, and you’ve admitted complicity; disagree, and you’ve revealed the pride that, in his theology, is itself corruption. That’s the intent. Not to diagnose a vague human “flaw,” but to corner the listener into the evangelical logic of total dependence: if the raw material for “the greatest enormities” is already inside you, then moral self-confidence becomes a dangerous illusion, and the Cross stops being an emblem and becomes an emergency intervention.

The phrasing does heavy work. “Does not every man feel” appeals to interior experience rather than argument, as if conscience is a universal instrument calibrated to the same grim reading. “Corruption enough” is strikingly economic, almost quantitative; it suggests a reservoir, not a slip. Then Simeon leaps from inward tendency to outward catastrophe (“commission”) and finally to ultimate consequence (“eternally… destroy his soul”). The escalation is deliberate: it collapses the comforting gap between “I have dark thoughts” and “I would never do that,” insisting the distance is thinner than we imagine.

Context matters: Simeon was a flagship figure of Anglican evangelicalism, preaching in a culture that prized decorum and moral respectability. On the Feast of the Holy Cross, he leverages the calendar’s focus on crucifixion to puncture polite religion. The subtext is pastoral and tactical: shame the audience out of complacency, then make grace feel not optional but necessary. The Cross, in that frame, isn’t sentimental. It’s the only antidote proportionate to what’s already festering in the self.