Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert South

South builds the line like a dare, turning prayer from pious background noise into a contest of will. The sentence is engineered as a balance scale: put the supplicant's earnestness on one side and the tempter's pressure on the other. Match the intensity, he implies, and you already have the "surer measure" you keep looking for. The syntax itself performs the theology - conditional, brisk, almost procedural. No mystic fog, no sentimental comfort. This is religion as discipline.

As a late 17th-century Anglican preacher, South was writing into a culture that prized order, suspicion of "enthusiasm" (too much private revelation), and a very practical moral psychology. Temptation, in his framing, is not an abstract force but an active agent with strategy and persistence. That personification flatters the listener's sense of being under siege, which then justifies a more militant spirituality: prayer is not mood management; it's counter-pressure.

The subtext is quietly polemical. South is warning against the common move of outsourcing virtue to systems: vows, rules, rituals, clever "measures". Those can help, but they are secondary. What's primary is seriousness - the interior heat that makes a spiritual practice effective. He also slips in a bracing Protestant realism: you don't need certainty, only resolve. Earnestness is the hinge between doctrine and behavior, the difference between religion as a badge and religion as resistance.