Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Hugh Clough

Clough’s line lands like a small slap to the pieties of his century: salvation may be free, but understanding costs. The phrasing borrows the clean moral architecture of Christian language - grace as unearned gift - only to pivot into the blunt, secular economy of “the market,” where knowledge is something you pay for in time, risk, embarrassment, and compromise. It’s a poet’s distillation of modernity’s bargain: faith can be received with open hands; insight is transactional.

The intent feels pointedly anti-sentimental. “Given of god” is passive and lofty; “bought” is active, almost grubby. Clough stages a clash between two systems of value: one that flatters the soul with the idea of divine favor, and one that forces the mind into the world’s friction. The subtext is that people often want the aura of wisdom without its price tag. You don’t get to skip the apprenticeship - the books, the argument, the work, the encounter with other people’s minds - by appealing to purity of heart.

Context matters: Clough wrote in a Victorian moment when religious certainty was being stress-tested by science, industrial capitalism, and new forms of public debate. His own biography is shot through with doubt and moral seriousness, and the line reads like a credo for the ethically anxious intellectual: stay humble about grace, but don’t mystify knowledge. In a culture prone to treating conviction as a substitute for competence, Clough insists that understanding is earned in public, not bestowed in private.