Science & Tech Quote by Robert Barclay

Barclay is selling a method, not a mood. The sentence moves with the calm confidence of someone arguing that spirituality should be treated with the same procedural seriousness as carpentry or medicine: if you want mastery, you don’t daydream about mastery, you seek the means that reliably produce it. That’s the hook. He smuggles a radical claim into a common-sense analogy.

The intent is plainly corrective. Barclay, a major Quaker apologist, is pushing back on a Christianity that prizes inherited creed, clerical authority, or verbal assent as if they were shortcuts to holiness. By invoking “art or science,” he aligns religious formation with disciplined practice and tested tools. The “how much more then” is rhetorical leverage: if you accept the logic in “natural and earthly” matters, you’re cornered into accepting it for “spiritual” matters, where the stakes are higher and the excuses thinner.

The subtext is quietly anti-credential. “Means” implies access: the path to spiritual knowledge is not monopolized by universities, pulpits, or Latin. In Quaker terms, the means are inward attention, obedience to the Inner Light, communal discernment, and a life that verifies belief. He’s also warning against a sentimental faith that wants outcomes without process - grace as consumer product.

Context matters: late 17th-century Britain is a battleground of sects, state churches, and persecution. Barclay’s discipline-first spirituality reads as both pragmatic and insurgent: a way to justify dissent while insisting that genuine religion is empirically lived, not merely declared.