Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Henry

A Puritan plain-speech warning dressed up as common sense, Matthew Henry's line lands like a procedural rule and a moral verdict at once. "Public trusts" is doing double duty: it means offices and responsibilities, but also the fragile, communal faith that holds a society together. Henry treats that trust as something almost sacramental - not a perk to be claimed, but a deposit to be guarded.

The sentence is built to slow you down. "Not fit" opens with refusal, not advice; the authority of the statement comes from denial. Then the repetition of "fit" functions like a doctrinal hammer: fitness isn't assumed by birth, charm, or patronage. It's demonstrated. The passive construction - "proved and found fit" - is especially telling. Henry isn't describing private self-confidence; he's insisting on public evaluation. Someone must do the proving. Someone must do the finding. Accountability is communal, not internal.

Context matters: Henry is a dissenting-era English cleric writing in a culture bruised by civil war, religious conflict, and shifting regimes, where the question of who gets to wield authority was existential. Read that way, the line sounds less like technocratic credentialism and more like a theological check on power. Sin is assumed; therefore competence and character must be tested before authority is granted.

The subtext is a rebuke to unearned rule: if you're entrusted with the public's business, you are a steward, not an owner. And stewardship begins with scrutiny.