Faith & Spirit Quote by George Gillespie

There is acid in the piety of that sentence: it turns a devotional badge into an indictment. Gillespie isn’t lamenting generic hypocrisy; he’s naming a particular scandal of his century, when men could loudly “profess the name of God” while treating God’s oath as negotiable language, a tool for politics, war, and reputation management. In an age of covenants, sworn allegiances, and public vows, the oath wasn’t a private moral flourish. It was binding social glue, the thing that made promises enforceable when contracts were thin and institutions unstable. To play fast with an oath was to unravel trust itself.

The phrasing does its work by shrinking the offender. “How small regard” is less a description than a moral measurement, weighing reverence and finding it embarrassingly light. Gillespie’s subtext is sharper: the most dangerous people are not unbelievers but believers who treat sacred speech as cover. “Professing” implies performance, a public posture. “The name of God” becomes a credential; “the oath of God” becomes inconvenient fine print. He’s accusing his audience of using theology like branding while ignoring the costly part: constraint.

Context matters. Gillespie, a Scottish Presbyterian tied to the Westminster debates, lived through civil conflict where sworn religious-political commitments were everywhere and betrayal was common. The line reads as pastoral warning and political critique at once: if Christians normalize oath-breaking, they don’t just sin; they train society to doubt every sacred and civic bond.