Aging & Wisdom Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Fosdick is selling a theology of pressure: not the soft reassurance that faith will spare you, but the bracing claim that suffering is the workshop where character gets built. The sentence structure is doing the heavy lifting. Those clipped, almost proverb-like clauses ("He who... will...") sound like moral law, not personal opinion. He turns hardship into a kind of spiritual physics: remove resistance and you remove strength; remove calamity and you remove the need for courage.

The subtext is a quiet argument with two audiences at once. To the comfortable, it punctures the fantasy that a protected life is a fully lived one. To the battered, it tries to rescue pain from meaninglessness without romanticizing it outright. "Mysterious though it is" is a strategic hedge; Fosdick knows this can sound cruel in the wrong mouth. He grants the mystery to avoid claiming that troubles are good in themselves, then pivots to a more defensible point: our favorite virtues are often forged, not inherited.

Context matters. Fosdick preached through industrial upheaval, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, and he was a leading voice in liberal Protestantism, trying to keep faith credible in a modern, bruising century. This is pastoral rhetoric shaped like stoicism: a sermon that meets chaos with a disciplined promise of growth. It works because it doesn’t offer escape; it offers an ethic of endurance, turning the worst weather into a form of moral proof.