Justice & Law Quote by Paul Elmer More

Humility, here, isn’t a Hallmark virtue; it’s a survival tactic for minds living through moral weather. Paul Elmer More wrote as a critic in an early-20th-century America drunk on progress talk and newly confident in secular expertise. His move is to reframe humility not as self-abasement but as the last workable posture when life, politics, or history stop cooperating with our plans. “In such a state” does a lot of quiet work: it implies crisis, disorientation, maybe even civilizational fatigue. This is humility for the storm season.

The sentence is built like a chain of necessity: humility is “the virtue” and “their only defense.” More isn’t praising meekness; he’s arguing that without a disciplined surrender, people become defenseless against despair, resentment, and the seductive alternative religion of ego. The subtext is anti-modern, or at least anti-modernist: the real danger isn’t ignorance but overconfidence, the belief that our private judgment is sufficient to justify whatever we do next.

His most provocative choice is the demand to “never doubt,” not because doubt is intellectually illegitimate, but because doubt corrodes endurance when suffering hits. “Whatever befall” widens the scope from personal misfortune to historical catastrophe, making faith less an opinion than a stance. “His will is good” and “His law is right” doubles down on moral order: goodness (teleology) and rightness (ethics). More is trying to fortify a reader against the modern temptation to treat morality as negotiable when circumstances get ugly.