Daily Inspiration Quote by Archibald Alexander

Alexander is poking at a flattering story people like to tell about themselves: that self-interest makes us gullible. Sure, he concedes, we’ll swallow convenient ideas in “common cases.” But the sharper point is the reversal. When the news is not just helpful but astonishingly good, the reflex isn’t belief; it’s suspicion.

That twist carries a pastor’s psychological realism. In a religious context shaped by revival culture and debates over conversion, “very great and unexpected good news” practically signals the Gospel itself: grace offered without the usual accounting. Alexander’s intent is quietly diagnostic, less about cynically exposing hypocrisy than about naming a spiritual problem that hides behind a modern-sounding term: incredulity as self-protection. If ordinary self-interest makes people credulous, extraordinary mercy threatens the inner narrative that we live in a world of earned outcomes. We distrust it because accepting it would force a rewrite of how the moral universe works - and of how we’ve been managing our own self-image.

The subtext: skepticism isn’t always intellectual rigor. Sometimes it’s pride with better posture, a refusal to be “given” anything on terms we don’t control. By narrowing his claim to “very great and unexpected” news, Alexander also anticipates the paradox of testimony: the more life-changing the report, the more it trips our fraud detectors. His line functions as pastoral strategy, disarming the listener who thinks doubt is proof of sophistication, and reframing disbelief as an emotional and moral stance with consequences.