Faith & Spirit Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Hammon writes like a man arguing against the lazy logic of the crowd: if everyone treats something as disposable, maybe it is disposable. His sentence is built to short-circuit that reflex. Notice the double warning. First, dont let widespread neglect harden you. Then, dont let that hardness curdle into contempt. He is less worried about ignorance than about the emotional alchemy that turns other peoples indifference into your own dismissal.

The context matters: Jupiter Hammon was an enslaved Black poet and an early African American published writer, speaking within a world where literacy itself was a gate-kept privilege and where Christianity was often used as both a language of comfort and a tool of control. When he points out that many who can read never look into the Bible, he is implicitly separating access from attention and status from seriousness. The dig lands on the respectable, literate classes: having the skill and still refusing the text is a moral failure, not a neutral choice.

Subtext: the Bibles worth is not validated by popularity. Hammon is defending a minority practice of disciplined reading against a majority drift toward neglect. And for someone living under bondage, that defense also carries a quiet claim to interior freedom: even if the world limits your body and your schooling, your mind can still refuse the crowds verdict. The line is pastoral, but it is also political, insisting that truth is not a headcount.