Time & Perspective Quote by Simon Greenleaf

Greenleaf’s sentence is a small masterclass in judicial stagecraft: it pretends to dodge a question while quietly dictating the permissible answers. “As we doubt not he was” is doing the heavy lifting. It smuggles in a contested premise - that humanity began with knowledge of “the true Jehovah” - then treats it as settled fact, not an argument. The voice isn’t searching; it’s stipulating, the way a judge narrows what a jury is allowed to consider.

The rhetorical move is strategic: he acknowledges an obvious complication for a Bible-centered origin story (early, widespread “baser” worship), then declares the complication “foreign to our present purpose.” That phrase isn’t modesty; it’s boundary-setting. Greenleaf is ring-fencing the discussion so that the uncomfortable historical and anthropological questions - how religions actually evolve, how “monotheism” and “idolatry” are retrofitted categories - don’t get to destabilize the frame.

Context matters. Greenleaf wrote in a 19th-century Anglo-American Protestant intellectual world where “natural theology” and courtroom-style apologetics were popular: treat Christianity like a case, manage the evidence, keep the narrative coherent. His legal sensibility shows in the hierarchy of terms. “True” and “baser” aren’t descriptions; they’re verdicts. The subtext is less about curiosity than control: we already know the correct starting point, and we will not allow messy history to reopen it.

It’s a line that reveals how authority often operates - not by refuting counterarguments, but by deeming them out of scope.