Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Hall

Prejudice, in Hall's framing, isn't just a moral lapse; it's a social reflex with impeccable credentials. By stacking "antiquity", "authority", and "custom", he names the three-piece suit respectability wears to make bad ideas look inevitable. The line works because it flatters the reader's intelligence while indicting the reader's instincts: you think you're weighing arguments, but you're often obeying signals of legitimacy.

Hall, a late-18th/early-19th-century clergyman, is writing in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and amid the tremors of revolution, dissent, and reform. In that world, "authority" could mean church hierarchy, monarchy, or the local magistrate; "custom" could be everything from class deference to denominational habits; "antiquity" was the trump card used to defend inherited power. His intent is corrective: to warn congregations and citizens that longevity is not evidence, and social consensus is not truth.

The subtext is theological and political at once. As a preacher, Hall knows how easily religious institutions can mistake tradition for revelation. He's also speaking to a Britain anxious about upheaval, where tradition was marketed as stability and skepticism as sedition. The phrase "apt to be strongly prejudiced" is a genteel diagnosis that lands like a rebuke: we're not merely persuaded by the past, we're biased toward it - and that bias conveniently serves whoever currently speaks with "authority". Hall's sentence is a call to re-audit your beliefs, especially the ones you inherited without remembering when you first agreed to them.