War & Peace Quote by George A. Smith

A clergyman’s line that sounds like pastoral comfort is also a subtle rebuke: if you need “deliverance from himself,” then the self is the problem. Smith isn’t simply praising scenery; he’s diagnosing a spiritual condition common to revival-era Protestant America, where conscience could feel like an overworked courtroom and memory like evidence that never stops resurfacing. “Oblivion of his past” is the daring phrase here. Clergy typically traffic in remembrance (of sin, of vows, of salvation history). Smith flips that expectation and offers Nature as a temporary sacrament of forgetting: not absolution exactly, but respite.

The sentence works because it stacks escapes in escalating intimacy. “Deliverance” implies bondage; “oblivion” implies the specific chain is guilt; “peace and purity” land as the emotional and moral afterglow. Nature becomes a kind of externalized grace, an unargued goodness that doesn’t require you to narrate your failures. The subtext is almost therapeutic before therapy had cultural status: step outside the cramped loop of self-scrutiny and let the nonhuman world interrupt you.

There’s also a quiet negotiation with nineteenth-century Romanticism. Emerson and the Transcendentalists were turning Nature into a theology; Smith, as a clergyman, borrows the mood while keeping the moral telos. Nature doesn’t replace God, but it functions as God’s understudy: a place where the mind can be cleaned without being interrogated. That blend of consolation and correction is the line’s real intent: to remind readers that salvation isn’t only a doctrine to assent to, it’s a felt release from the tyranny of one’s own inner noise.