Love Quote by John Woolman

Guilt becomes a lever in Woolman’s sentence, and he pulls it with the steady force of a man trying to move an entire community. The phrasing is deliberately inward - “My heart hath... been deeply afflicted” - but the target is social, not private. He’s performing a Quaker kind of self-indictment that refuses the comfort of personal piety: if righteousness isn’t “lifted up to the people,” the failure isn’t in the crowd’s morals but in the community’s witness.

The key maneuver is how he distributes blame. “By us, as a society” widens the radius beyond individual hypocrisy to institutional softness. Woolman doesn’t accuse his neighbors of rejecting Christ; he suggests they’ve never been given the clearest version of what Christ demands because leaders and fellow believers have been insufficiently “faithful.” It’s a subtle but cutting critique of religious respectability - the way a church can keep its tone gentle and its conscience clean by lowering the “standard” in practice while praising it in theory.

Context sharpens the stakes. Woolman is remembered for anti-slavery activism and economic scruples (against dyed goods, exploitative commerce, and comfort built on others’ suffering). Read through that lens, “pure righteousness” isn’t abstract virtue; it’s a moral clarity that would have consequences in the marketplace, in household labor, in what a “Christian” society tolerates. The sentence is long because it’s trying to hold two truths at once: humility of posture, severity of demand. That combination is the engine of Woolman’s persuasion.