Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Fosdick isn’t praising ignorance; he’s defending scale. The line sets up a choice that sounds like a temperament test but is really a critique of intellectual smallness dressed up as certainty. To prefer mystery is to prefer a universe that stays bigger than your personal mental furniture. The rhetorical trick is the downgrade of “comprehend”: not enlightenment, but containment. A world fully graspable by one mind would be, by definition, cramped, flattened to human measure, and therefore unworthy of awe.

As a prominent liberal Protestant in the early 20th century, Fosdick lived inside the pressure cooker of modernity: Darwin, higher biblical criticism, industrial upheaval, the First World War, then the Great Depression. The fundamentalist-modernist fights weren’t abstract; they were battles over who gets to police reality. His subtext pushes back against the spiritual sales pitch of total answers. He’s carving out room for faith without pretending it’s a rival laboratory.

The sentence also smuggles in an ethic: humility as courage. Mystery here isn’t a fog machine; it’s an acknowledgment that the deepest things - suffering, beauty, moral responsibility - don’t shrink neatly into doctrine or data. Fosdick’s intent is pastoral as much as polemical: if you need certainty to feel safe, you’ll end up worshipping a reduced god and calling it truth. He offers a different comfort: the mind can stretch, the world can remain vast, and that’s not a crisis. It’s the point.