Time & Perspective Quote by Matthew Simpson

History humbles the ego here, and Simpson knows exactly how to make that humility feel like a moral obligation rather than a mere intellectual posture. The line starts in the first-person plural - we - a clerical move that sounds communal but also gently indicting. You can almost hear the sermon cadence: we have lived, seen, witnessed. Each verb shrinks the radius of lived experience to a small, respectable circle, then punctures it with the blunt question: what are these?

The intent isn’t to dismiss eyewitness knowledge; it’s to dethrone it. In an era when the United States was swelling with confidence - expansion, revivalism, reform, and the violent arguments that would culminate in civil war - “personal contact” could masquerade as authority. Simpson, a Methodist bishop steeped in public life, pushes back against the assumption that proximity equals understanding. He’s warning congregants and citizens alike: your strongest opinions may be built on the thinnest slice of reality.

The subtext is also theological. A clergyman invoking “the world’s past” isn’t just tallying centuries; he’s gesturing toward providence, the long arc in which human events are partial, morally charged fragments. The rhetorical question functions like a trapdoor: it drops the listener from self-certainty into perspective. That’s why it works. It doesn’t argue with your experience; it miniaturizes it, then asks you to think and judge as if you’re accountable to something larger than your biography.