Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney Smith

A polite little steamroller of a sentence, dressed in clerical manners. Smith’s line flatters collaboration while quietly asserting inevitability: get the right men in the right room and the outcome is settled. The phrase “lay their heads together” sounds homespun and harmless, but it’s also a wink at backroom governance. Decisions, Smith suggests, are not forged in open theological debate or democratic deliberation; they’re arranged by the institutional brains trust, then presented to everyone else as foregone conclusion.

The sly force sits in “the thing.” Vague on purpose. By refusing to name the matter at hand, Smith points to a pattern rather than a single issue: ecclesiastical administration as a machine that can process any question into a tidy resolution, provided the designated authorities confer. It’s bureaucracy with incense. “Will be done” seals the deal with a passive certainty that reads like providence but is really procedure.

Context matters: Smith was an Anglican clergyman and a prominent wit, a reform-minded voice who understood the Church as both moral actor and political organism. Deans and canons weren’t just spiritual caretakers; they were managers of property, patronage, and social order. The line catches the Church’s two-faced power: serene, deliberative, almost domestic in its language, while exercising the kind of quiet coordination that keeps hierarchies intact. Smith’s intent isn’t simply to praise competence; it’s to expose how authority naturalizes itself by making decisions sound like the most reasonable thing in the world.