Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Whately

Habit is a better atheist than argument. Whately’s line skewers a quiet moral glitch: the more reliably a good thing arrives, the less it feels like a gift and the more it starts to feel like a right. The sentence is built like a trap. “Generally true” lowers your defenses with a sober, empirical shrug, then “all that is required” lands the punchline: ingratitude doesn’t need vice, just repetition. Blessings don’t have to stop; they only have to become scheduled.

The intent isn’t merely to scold. It’s to diagnose the psychology of entitlement with the precision of a moral economist. “Often and regularly” sounds like payroll, not providence, and that’s the point: regularity converts wonder into background noise. What you “owe God” becomes a debt you forget you’re carrying because the creditor is too consistent. The subtext is less about God’s fragility than about human attention: reverence is not defeated by doubt, but by routine.

Context matters. Whately was an Anglican cleric and public intellectual writing in a Britain where “blessing” could mean both daily bread and national fortune amid industrial expansion. Regularized abundance (wages, trade, infrastructure) didn’t just change material life; it changed spiritual posture. His warning anticipates a modern problem: when systems work, they disappear from our moral accounting. Gratitude, in his view, isn’t a spontaneous feeling but a discipline that must fight the narcotic of normalcy.