"God never made His work for man to mend"
About this Quote
A neat piece of piety with a barb under the velvet: Dryden’s line isn’t praising human humility so much as policing human ambition. “God never made His work for man to mend” frames the world as a finished artifact, sealed by divine authorship, and treats “mending” as a kind of trespass. The verb matters. “Mend” sounds domestic, practical, almost kindly, which makes the rebuke sharper: even our most well-intentioned fixes can be recast as arrogance when they imply God got something wrong.
Dryden wrote in a century that watched England chew through civil war, regicide, restoration, plague, fire, and then the convulsions of the Glorious Revolution. Political life was a workshop full of people insisting they could repair the nation by force. Dryden, who shifted allegiances and later converted to Catholicism, knew the dangers of reform talk: it can be moral cover for power grabs. The quote works as a theological veto on utopian tinkering, a warning that “improvement” often smuggles in contempt for the given world - and for the people stuck living in it.
There’s also a writerly subtext. Dryden is defending the idea of order: in art, in society, in providence. The line flatters restraint and mocks the busybody impulse, suggesting that the impulse to correct everything is less virtue than vanity. It’s a conservative aphorism, but not a lazy one: it compresses a whole argument about limits, legitimacy, and the seductive rhetoric of “fixing” into nine words.
Dryden wrote in a century that watched England chew through civil war, regicide, restoration, plague, fire, and then the convulsions of the Glorious Revolution. Political life was a workshop full of people insisting they could repair the nation by force. Dryden, who shifted allegiances and later converted to Catholicism, knew the dangers of reform talk: it can be moral cover for power grabs. The quote works as a theological veto on utopian tinkering, a warning that “improvement” often smuggles in contempt for the given world - and for the people stuck living in it.
There’s also a writerly subtext. Dryden is defending the idea of order: in art, in society, in providence. The line flatters restraint and mocks the busybody impulse, suggesting that the impulse to correct everything is less virtue than vanity. It’s a conservative aphorism, but not a lazy one: it compresses a whole argument about limits, legitimacy, and the seductive rhetoric of “fixing” into nine words.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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