Parenting & Family Quote by John Woolman

Woolman’s sentence walks a tightrope between tenderness and terror, and that’s the point. He begins with the most disarming image possible: “kind parents” who “delight” in their children’s happiness. That domestic warmth isn’t sentimental padding; it’s a rhetorical trap. Once you accept the premise that good parents love, he pivots to a harsher claim: a God of “perfect goodness” can “send abroad mortal contagions” and still be good, because He “direct[s] their use.” The logic isn’t just theological; it’s disciplinary. Suffering becomes not an accident of nature or a failure of society, but an instrument with an intended outcome.

The subtext is Quaker in its moral economy: affliction is meant to reorient the soul toward humility, restraint, and obedience. Woolman wrote in an era when epidemics were recurring facts of life and when many Christians interpreted catastrophe as providence. But he’s also writing against a background of moral crisis that Quakers felt acutely: slavery, war, luxury, and spiritual complacency. By framing contagion as “directed,” he quietly resists purely material explanations and redirects the reader inward: What is this meant to do to us?

Notice how the sentence never names the victims. “Mortal contagions” are abstracted, almost bureaucratic, while God’s goodness is asserted as “assuredly.” That asymmetry reveals the intent: to secure trust in providence even when the evidence is mass death, and to turn fear of disease into a lever for ethical self-scrutiny rather than panic or blame.