Faith & Spirit Quote by Francis Asbury

Rest, for Asbury, isn’t achieved by retreating from the world but by being swallowed up in it. “More at rest” lands with a paradoxical calm: the soul settles not when life gets quiet, but when the hands are moving. In the Methodist universe Asbury helped build, idleness wasn’t neutral downtime; it was open space the “tempter” could rent out. Work becomes a spiritual barricade.

The line carries the logic of an itinerant clergyman who spent decades on horseback, organizing circuits, preaching relentlessly, and turning motion into mission. Asbury’s Methodism prized disciplined habits over lofty mystical episodes. Holiness wasn’t mainly a private glow; it was a schedule. “Busily employed” implies more than generic productivity. It means purposeful labor, ideally in service to God and community, where attention is directed outward and the self has less room to spiral into desire, resentment, or despair.

The subtext is a practical psychology dressed in theological language. Temptation thrives on rumination, boredom, and the kind of solitude where appetite narrates itself as destiny. Constant engagement interrupts that narrative. It’s also a quiet rebuke to spiritual romanticism: you don’t defeat inner chaos by brooding over it; you outrun it through duty.

Read in context, the sentence doubles as self-prescription and pastoral advice. For a leader overseeing a young, expanding American religious movement amid frontier instability, “busy” wasn’t a personality quirk - it was survival. The soul at rest is the soul given a task.