Love Quote by William Cowper

Cowper lands the line like a quiet verdict: humans can shut the door on mercy, but the divine keeps it open. The power is in the asymmetry. “May dismiss” suggests choice, even casualness, as if compassion were a bothersome guest we can wave away when it costs too much. “Never will” is absolute, unbargainable. In eight words, God becomes not merely kind but constitutively incapable of the coldness that feels so available to us.

The intent is pastoral, but not sentimental. Cowper isn’t flattering humanity’s better angels; he’s diagnosing how quickly self-interest, fear, and fatigue turn empathy into an optional practice. The subtext carries his era’s moral psychology: eighteenth-century Anglican and evangelical currents stressed both human frailty and divine steadfastness. Compassion here functions like a moral litmus test, and Cowper implies we routinely fail it.

Context matters because Cowper’s religious writing is threaded with lived extremity. He struggled for years with severe depression and recurring religious dread, convinced at times that he was beyond grace. Read against that biography, the line becomes less a tidy theological slogan than a personal counterspell: when your own heart goes numb or punitive, God’s disposition doesn’t mirror your volatility. It’s a rebuke to cruelty, yes, but also a stabilizer for despair.

What makes it work is its implicit social critique. If compassion can be “dismissed,” then neglect isn’t always ignorance; it’s often will. Cowper answers that bleakness with a higher standard that doesn’t depend on our mood, politics, or appetite for inconvenience.