Faith & Spirit Quote by Frederick William Robertson

A hard-edged kind of consolation is at work here: not the promise that suffering will stop, but the insistence that it still means something. Robertson, a 19th-century Anglican preacher with a reputation for emotional intensity, writes into an age that treated pain as both spiritual test and social fact. Victorians lived close to death, disease, and moral striving; faith wasn’t an aesthetic preference so much as an operating system for getting through the day. The line meets that reality without flinching.

Notice the rhetorical stacking: "dark and profitless", "painful and weary". He grants the bleakest verdict first, even allowing the terrifying possibility that life feels purposeless. Then comes the pivot: "life is not done". Not because you feel hope, not because circumstances improve, but because duty and formation are still in progress. The subtext is quietly bracing, almost severe: your mood doesn’t get veto power over your calling.

"Christian character is not won" is the key phrase. Character is treated like a contested victory, something earned under pressure, not declared by belief alone. Robertson reframes suffering as curriculum and work as assignment: God has "anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do". That "or" matters. He refuses the pious trap of romanticizing pain; action counts as much as endurance. The intent is pastoral but also disciplinary: to keep the exhausted from surrendering to nihilism, and to keep the devout from imagining sanctity is a private feeling rather than a life completed in service and stamina.