Daily Inspiration Quote by John Woolman

Woolman writes like a man trying to scare his own side into honesty. The line isn’t aimed at enslavers alone; it’s aimed at the comfortable bystanders in the pews who want their faith to feel like reassurance rather than indictment. By invoking “the ears of the Most High,” he stages an unignorable escalation: the suffering of enslaved people is not merely a social complaint but a testimony already entered into the highest court. The real pressure point lands in the second sentence. “He cannot be partial in our favor” is a theological trapdoor for Christian hypocrisy, yanking away the cozy assumption that God is automatically on the side of the colonists, the prosperous, the “respectable.”

The genius is in how he flips the moral geography. Enslaved people, denied legal personhood, are granted spiritual audibility; their “cries” travel where colonial power cannot censor them. Meanwhile “our” becomes an accusation. Woolman isn’t praising divine justice in the abstract; he’s warning that judgment is “pure” and “certain” precisely because it will not be bribed by status, nationality, or even religious identity. If you’ve built your economy on bondage, you’ve also built your future on a verdict.

Context matters: Woolman, a Quaker preacher in the mid-18th century, was speaking inside a religious community already wrestling with slavery’s moral scandal. His strategy is pastoral but unsentimental: he doesn’t beg for empathy; he insists on accountability, using God’s impartiality to make neutrality impossible.