Daily Inspiration Quote by Josiah Strong

The sentence tries to smuggle a hierarchy into the room under the guise of calm observation. Strong’s “Furthermore” performs the most telling work: it signals that we’re already mid-argument, accumulating “evidence” as if the conclusion were simply the next logical step rather than a moral choice. “It is significant” is the classic move of authority-talk, a soft command to the reader: treat this as important because I’m naming it important. The passive construction (“are being here emphasized”) erases the agent, hiding the fact that emphasis is an act - chosen, situated, political.

Then comes the real payload: “the marked characteristics of this race.” In Strong’s late-19th-century Protestant reform milieu, “race” is not neutral description; it’s a category built to rank groups while pretending to merely classify them. “Marked” is especially revealing. It implies visibility and deviation: the “characteristics” aren’t just traits, they’re signs to be read, almost like diagnostic symptoms. The phrase primes the reader to accept that a people can be understood, managed, and judged through supposedly obvious features.

Context sharpens the intent. Strong wrote at the height of American expansion, mass immigration, and Social Gospel-inflected moral confidence. Clergy like him often fused missionary zeal with nation-building, recasting power as providence. So the line’s subtext is less about description than permission: permission to generalize, to essentialize, to frame domination as the sober recognition of “significance.” It’s the rhetoric of empire in Sunday-best syntax, turning prejudice into a footnote of common sense.