Faith & Spirit Quote by Owen Feltham

Feltham goes for the quietest vice: not sin, but drift. By calling negligence "the rust of the soul", he chooses a metaphor that flatters no one. Rust is unromantic, incremental, almost invisible until the hinge won’t move. The line works because it refuses the drama of sudden moral collapse; it frames character as maintenance. You don’t lose your "best resolves" in a blaze of temptation. You lose them because you stop showing up for them.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the pious and the self-improvers, the people with plans. Feltham isn’t impressed by resolution as a performance. "Best resolves" suggests sincerity, even nobility, yet the sentence insists that sincerity is structurally fragile. Negligence doesn’t argue with your values; it simply corrodes the connection between intention and action. That’s why the image lands: rust eats through from the surface inward, turning strength into brittleness while the object still looks intact.

Context matters. Feltham, a 17th-century English moralist writing in an era obsessed with discipline, devotion, and self-scrutiny, treats the inner life like a household that can be kept or allowed to decay. The feminine "her" for the soul gives the line a quasi-allegorical, devotional flavor, but it also makes the corrosion feel intimate, almost domestic. The intended effect is less to shame than to spook: neglect is not neutral. It is an active agent of ruin, the slow chemistry that makes good intentions collapse under their own weight.