Love Quote by Donald Cargill

A blessing that lands like a verdict. Donald Cargill stacks virtues the way a preacher stacks kindling: holiness, number, love, religion, righteousness. It’s pastoral on the surface, but the list is strategic. He’s not only praying for piety; he’s praying for growth and cohesion in a community under pressure. “Number” sits there like a quiet admission that survival is also a headcount, a movement that needs bodies as much as beliefs.

Then comes the hard pivot: “wait you, and cease to contend.” The command isn’t passive; it’s discipline. Cargill is managing a persecuted faction’s emotional economy, redirecting energy away from futile argument and toward endurance. The men “that are gone from us” aren’t merely absent. In the Covenanter world Cargill inhabited, they are apostates, collaborators, or compromisers who’ve made their peace with a violent state church settlement. To keep fighting them in public is to fracture the faithful and hand the authorities an internal quarrel to exploit.

The subtext is bleakly realist: persuasion has limits. “There is nothing that shall convince them but judgment” draws a boundary around dialogue itself. It’s theology, but it’s also political psychology: some defections can’t be reversed by better rhetoric, only by consequences that arrive from outside the conversation - divine reckoning, historical collapse, the court of events.

Written from the edge of martyrdom (Cargill was executed in 1681), the line carries the fatal clarity of someone who believes time is short. It comforts, organizes, and hardens his audience all at once: be loving, grow stronger, stop arguing with ghosts, and let the final accounting do what debate cannot.