Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert South

A 17th-century clergyman praising restraint is never just giving craft advice; he is staging a moral hierarchy. South draws a bright line between "fancy" (the proliferating, pleasure-seeking mind) and "judgment" (the disciplining, pruning mind), then stacks them into an ethic: expansion is easy, contraction is virtue. The sentence performs its own argument. It starts by letting "fancy" run a little - enlarge, roam - then snaps shut with "shorten and contract", a tight verbal cinch that enacts judgment as control.

The subtext is theological and political. South is writing in a Restoration culture suspicious of religious "enthusiasm" and rhetorical excess, where imagination could look like temptation: a doorway to heresy, sedition, or the kind of self-authorizing inspiration that bypasses church and crown. To valorize judgment over imagination is to defend authority over novelty, orthodoxy over private revelation. Even the vocabulary of measurement ("enlarge", "shorten") carries a Protestant accountant's anxiety about surplus: too much ornament in language starts to resemble too much ornament in worship.

There's also a pragmatic intent aimed at listeners, not just readers. Sermons had to move an audience without intoxication. South is arguing that the real power of speech isn't in making the world bigger with glittering additions; it's in making meaning sharper by subtraction. In an age of baroque style and polemical heat, he offers an almost modern editorial credo: the noblest intelligence isn't the one that can imagine anything, but the one that knows what to leave out - and can justify that restraint as righteousness.