Education Quote by Frederick William Faber

Kindness, in Faber's hands, is not a soft virtue; it's a conversion technology. The line quietly demotes the church's prestige tools - zeal (moral intensity), eloquence (rhetorical flair), learning (the authority of scholarship) - and elevates the one method that works on people as they actually are: defensive, ashamed, and quick to smell judgment. He's arguing that persuasion fails when it feels like conquest. Kindness disarms because it refuses the usual script where the "sinner" is a problem to be solved.

The construction matters. "Converted more sinners" is bluntly outcome-driven, almost empirical for a Victorian theologian. Faber isn't praising kindness because it's pretty; he's claiming it gets results where performance and pedigree don't. The triad he sets up also reads like an internal critique of his own world: the pulpit's theatrics, the scholar's pride, the activist's heat. Kindness becomes a rebuke to religious professionalism - to the temptation to win arguments rather than people.

Context sharpens the edge. Mid-19th century British Christianity was split between muscular certainty and anxious reform, and Catholic converts like Faber were often seen as combative or sectarian. His line suggests an alternative to the era's doctrinal trench warfare: the credibility of mercy. Subtext: if your faith can't produce tenderness, your zeal is just ego with incense. Kindness isn't a detour from truth; it's the only delivery system that doesn't trigger the listener's exit reflex.