Faith & Spirit Quote by Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Strength, here, isn’t the clenched fist; it’s the hand that opens. Chapin flips the usual arithmetic of power - that dominance is proved by retaliation - and replaces it with a moral physics in which restraint costs more than revenge, and therefore counts for more. “Never does the human soul appear so strong” is a deliberately absolute setup, the kind a 19th-century clergyman can afford because he’s arguing less about psychology than about public virtue. He’s not describing what people commonly do; he’s prescribing what they should admire.

The key verb is “dares.” Forgiveness isn’t framed as softness or sainthood; it’s framed as risk. To forgive an injury is to accept a world where wrongs might go unbalanced, where the injured party relinquishes the clean, socially legible satisfaction of payback. Chapin’s subtext is that revenge is easy because it’s narratively simple: harm demands harm, and everyone understands the script. Forgiveness breaks the script and exposes the forgiver to misinterpretation - as naive, weak, or complicit. That vulnerability is the point. It’s moral courage performed without the applause lines.

Context matters: Chapin preached in an America increasingly defined by competitive individualism and honor culture, with simmering sectional grievance in the decades before the Civil War. In that atmosphere, revenge could pose as “justice,” and pride could masquerade as principle. Chapin’s intent is to reroute the audience’s status instincts: if you want to be seen as strong, he suggests, choose the act that feels socially unsafe. Forgiveness becomes a countercultural display of power: the ability to absorb injury without letting it write your character.