Parenting & Family Quote by Archibald Alexander

Alexander’s line performs a bracing pastoral judo move: it turns insult into access. The language is deliberately abrasive - “sinful, polluted, helpless, and miserable” - not because he’s savoring human wretchedness, but because he’s trying to remove the last respectable excuse for staying away. If the reader is waiting to become morally presentable before approaching Christ, Alexander tells them that readiness is the one thing that would actually disqualify them. The Savior “would not be suited” to the self-sufficient; grace is framed as a medicine that only makes sense if you admit you’re sick.

The subtext is a quiet assault on pride, especially the pious kind. “Not comprehended in his gracious invitations” is courtroom diction: you are either included in the offer or you are not. Alexander insists inclusion isn’t for the morally impressive; it’s for “the children of men,” a phrase that levels the hierarchy. He widens the doorway by lowering the threshold.

Context matters. As an early American Presbyterian theologian shaped by revival-era Protestantism, Alexander is speaking into a culture of anxious self-examination, where conversion narratives and “evidences” of sincerity could become another performance. His aim is to short-circuit spiritual perfectionism and the bourgeois instinct to tidy oneself up before entering religious space. The sentence is a stern comfort: your ruin is not a surprise to God; it’s the very condition the invitation presumes.