Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Hooker

Hooker is handing his listeners a diagnostic tool disguised as comfort: if you want to know what owns you, look at what you reach for when you feel accused. The phrasing is pointedly even-handed - “indifferently, as well for sins secret as open” - because Puritan moral accounting didn’t stop at public scandal. The real crisis, in Hooker’s world, is the private workaround: the hidden habit of soothing guilt without surrendering it.

“Best cordials” is the tell. He borrows the language of medicine and tonics, implying that consolation can be dosed, chosen, even abused. Comfort is not automatically holy; it can be a narcotic. Hooker’s intent is pastoral but also prosecutorial: he wants the soul to testify against itself. What comforts you most reveals what you trust most. If it’s “God’s Word,” you’re submitting to a kind of consolation that can cut before it heals. If it’s “natural means” - distraction, pleasure, reputation-management, self-justifying logic, even merely time - you may be treating symptoms while protecting the disease.

The subtext is a critique of spiritual consumerism centuries before the term existed: the impulse to curate relief rather than undergo repentance. In the 1630s and 1640s, as Hooker helped shape New England’s religious culture, this mattered politically as well as spiritually. A community built on covenant needed inward sincerity, not just outward conformity. By pushing believers to audit their “cordials,” Hooker is trying to prevent a society of respectable performances from becoming, in his view, a society quietly at war with God.