Parenting & Family Quote by Augustus Hare

Love is framed here less as a feeling than as a law of gravity: it “flows downward,” from the powerful to the dependent, from creator to created. Hare’s sentence builds a hierarchy that flatters the receiver and chastens the would-be giver. Parents over children; God over humans. The structure isn’t accidental. He starts with a domestic truth most readers will recognize (parental devotion tends to outmuscle adolescent ingratitude), then uses that recognition as a ramp into theology. If you assent to the first claim, the second arrives wearing borrowed credibility.

The subtext is pastoral and corrective. Victorian Anglican writing often aimed to produce not just belief but a certain emotional posture: humility, gratitude, a disciplined awareness of one’s smallness. By asking “who among the sons of men” and answering with an implied “no one,” Hare positions human love for God as inherently insufficient, almost embarrassing in proportion to divine generosity. The “thousandth part” is deliberate hyperbole: it turns the comparison into a moral discomfort you can’t easily talk your way out of.

There’s also an implicit defense of unequal relationships. “Downward” love is presented as natural and “always” true, a word that locks the argument in place. In an era preoccupied with duty, empire, and social rank, that rhetorical move matters: it sanctifies asymmetry by rebranding it as care. God’s love becomes the model, not for reciprocity, but for benevolent authority. The quote works because it recruits a tender scene (parent and child) to smuggle in a demanding spiritual conclusion: you can’t repay God; you can only receive, and feel the weight of receiving.