Creativity Quote by James Thomson

A good bishop, Thomson suggests, should be a little dangerous to polite society. The line works because it flips a common expectation: that religious authority is validated by universal approval, smooth manners, and social harmony. Thomson treats that impulse as a category error. If a bishop never offends, he may not be preaching, correcting, or even noticing the parts of communal life that actually need moral pressure. In this framing, “offence” isn’t petty provocation; it’s the inevitable friction that comes when a public moral figure speaks with clarity in a world built on compromise.

The subtext is pointedly institutional. Bishops sit at the junction of faith, class, and power; they can become custodians of respectability rather than shepherds of conscience. Thomson’s jab implies that a perfectly agreeable bishop has likely learned the art of saying nothing that could endanger his standing with patrons, politicians, or parish elites. Offence becomes a diagnostic tool: if nobody is irritated, then nobody is being challenged.

Context matters: early 18th-century Britain was an age of established churches and social stratification, where clerical careers could be as much about networks as about doctrine. Thomson, a musician navigating patronage and public taste, would have been keenly aware of how institutions reward pleasantness and punish friction. His line isn’t anti-religious so much as anti-complacency: it asks whether spiritual leadership is meant to soothe the powerful or unsettle them when necessary.