Daily Inspiration Quote by Donald Cargill

Cargill’s line is a velvet-gloved indictment: he’s not lamenting persecution so much as the comfortable Christianity that persecution exposes. “True conversion” is doing heavy work here. He’s drawing a hard boundary between inward transformation and mere affiliation, between a faith that costs something and a faith that functions like social belonging. The wish is pastoral on the surface, but the subtext is prosecutorial: if people were genuinely remade, “backsliding” wouldn’t be the default setting the moment pressure arrives.

The phrasing “for fear of suffering, living at ease” is almost a sneer at respectability. It assumes that ease is not neutral; it’s a seductive moral environment that trains believers to confuse safety with blessing. That’s a pointed claim in 17th-century Scotland, where the Covenanters were being fined, hunted, and killed for resisting state control over the church. Cargill himself would be executed; he’s speaking from inside the logic of consequence, not abstract piety.

What makes the sentence bite is the pivot from personal failure (“backsliding”) to collective scarcity: “so few to contend for Christ and His cause.” “Contend” frames faith as public struggle, not private sentiment. He’s trying to manufacture a minority with backbone, a remnant willing to be socially and physically endangered. In that light, the line isn’t just devotional; it’s recruiting rhetoric, sharpening identity through pressure, warning that a church optimized for comfort will always fold when history demands courage.