Faith & Spirit Quote by Francis Quarles

Self-congratulation is the real target here: Quarles punctures the piety that likes its own reflection. The line sounds devotional, but it’s a warning shot across the bow of public holiness. “Flatter not thyself” frames faith as a temptation to vanity, not automatically a virtue. Belief can become a private trophy case: correct doctrine, correct churchgoing, correct language about God. Quarles is saying that kind of faith is suspect precisely because it feels so secure.

“Charity” does heavy lifting in a 17th-century sense: not vague niceness, but active love, material care, an ethic that has to touch bodies and budgets. By tethering faith to neighbor-love, Quarles refuses the comfortable split between inner conviction and outward obligation. The subtext is social as much as spiritual: you don’t get to use God as cover for hardness, hierarchy, or indifference, especially in a society where religion was deeply entangled with status and civic belonging.

Context sharpens the edge. Quarles wrote in an England riven by confessional suspicion and approaching civil war; religious identity was a badge people wore loudly, sometimes violently. In that climate, “faith in God” could function as a tribal marker. Quarles’ couplet-like admonition re-centers Christianity on a measurable test: how you treat the person next to you. It’s rhetoric designed to embarrass the devout reader into self-audit, turning holiness from performance into practice.