Faith & Spirit Quote by George A. Smith

A sweeping moral permission slip, dressed up as theology. George A. Smith frames faith not as assent to doctrine but as a kind of sanctioned self-trust: if your route to God begins with what you recognize as best in yourself, you "cannot be wrong". The line is doing pastoral triage. It lowers the stakes for the anxious believer who fears that doubt, imperfect knowledge, or an unorthodox path might disqualify them from grace. Smith turns the believer's interior life into admissible evidence.

The subtext is more strategic. By citing Jesus Christ as the guarantor, Smith smuggles in a remarkably liberal-sounding principle while keeping it tethered to Christian authority. He isn't saying every conclusion you reach is correct; he's saying the act of arguing toward God from your highest moral intuitions is itself protected from condemnation. That reframes religion as aspiration rather than compliance, a move that comforts individual conscience without fully surrendering the idea of a transcendent endpoint.

Context matters: as a 19th-century clergyman, Smith is speaking in an era when Christianity was negotiating modernity, pluralism, and the rise of personal religious experience. The emphasis on "what he finds best in himself" echoes a wider Protestant focus on inward sincerity, while also pre-empting sectarian gatekeeping. It's a line meant to disarm the bouncer at the door of heaven: even if you arrive by a strange road, the sincerity of your moral starting point counts as a credential.