Faith & Spirit Quote by John Nelson Darby

Darby’s line reads like a spiritual mic drop, but it’s also a manifesto of control: attention, identity, even moral accounting are to be narrowed to a single point. “Christ has been my only object” is not just piety; it’s an organizing principle. The word “object” matters. It suggests focus, aim, target - an almost managerial spirituality where the self is disciplined by a fixed reference. That fits Darby’s wider legacy as a founder of the Plymouth Brethren and a key architect of dispensational thought: a Christianity suspicious of muddiness, institutions, and mixed motives, built instead on clean lines of doctrine and separation.

The subtext tightens with the startling coupling: “thank God, my righteousness too.” He’s not claiming personal virtue so much as insisting that righteousness is located outside the self, credited rather than achieved. That’s classic Protestant grammar, but Darby’s phrasing adds a proprietary edge: not “a righteousness” but “my righteousness,” secured by Christ, immune to the fluctuations of feeling and performance. It’s assurance as an antidote to anxiety - and also as a boundary marker. If righteousness is Christ alone, then competing sources (church tradition, sacraments, social respectability, even “good works” as leverage) get demoted.

“Hold fast to Christ” turns the statement outward, pastoral and urgent. It’s counsel for a community formed in dissent and expecting pressure: stay anchored, don’t negotiate, don’t drift into compromise. The intent isn’t inspirational vagueness; it’s spiritual triage. In a 19th-century landscape of theological liberalization, revivalism, and denominational churn, Darby offers a simple, severe center of gravity: cling to the one thing that cannot be reorganized by the age.