Aging & Wisdom Quote by Hannah More

More writes like a moralist with a poet's ear for the arguments people wish they could avoid. The sing-song rhyme and nursery-plain diction are deliberate camouflage: she smuggles a hard theological claim into a form that sounds inevitable, almost childishly obvious. "If faith produce no works" doesn not merely scold hypocrisy; it denies the legitimacy of a private, untouchable belief that asks to be respected while refusing to be tested. The "living tree" image does heavy lifting: fruitlessness isn't a minor flaw, it's proof of death. Faith without action isn't incomplete; it's counterfeit.

The subtext is social as much as spiritual. More was a devout Anglican and a prominent evangelical-leaning reformer writing in a Britain jittery about revolution abroad and disorder at home. Her version of religion insists on visible moral labor: charity schools, reform of manners, discipline of appetite. That emphasis can read as benevolent urgency or as a demand for conformity, depending on who is being asked to "work" and who gets to define the work.

Her most cunning move is the closing echo of the marriage liturgy: "What God hath joined, let no man part". It frames the faith-versus-works debate as an act of vandalism, not interpretation. By pairing abstractions as "soul and body, hand and heart", she renders separation grotesque and unnatural. The rhetoric leaves little room for loopholes: if you want the comfort of faith, you inherit its obligations. In More's hands, belief is not a refuge from ethics; it's the engine of it.