Faith & Spirit Quote by Matthew Henry

Prayer, in Matthew Henry's hands, isn't an escape hatch from ethics; it's a ledger. The line has the clipped moral clarity of a pastor who knows how quickly devotion curdles into performance. "Keep some account" sounds almost mercantile, and that's the point: if prayer is treated as weightless speech, it becomes the easiest currency to counterfeit. Henry pulls prayer down from the clouds and pins it to the calendar, the checkbook, the daily choices that expose whether the soul is sincere or merely eloquent.

The sting is in the phrase "unsay them in our practice". He assumes a common human trick: we ask for patience at dawn, then rehearse our impatience all day; we pray for humility, then collect status like a hobby; we plead for deliverance from temptation, then schedule it. Henry isn't accusing people of hypocrisy as a rare vice. He's treating it as the default setting, the natural drift of religious life when words outpace discipline.

Context matters: Henry is writing as an English Nonconformist preacher in a Protestant culture saturated with religious language, where confession and petition could become routine, even socially rewarded. His intent is accountability without spectacle. "Account" doesn't mean broadcasting your piety; it means auditing it. The subtext is almost modern: if you can't trace a prayer into behavior, the prayer is at risk of becoming self-soothing rhetoric - a way to feel righteous without the inconvenience of being changed.