Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Spurgeon

Spurgeon’s line is a clean slap at the little moral workaround everyone wants: the idea that ethics is a menu where you can pick the “less bad” option and call it virtue. “Of two evils, choose neither” doesn’t flatter the reader with nuance; it corners them with a standard. Coming from a 19th-century Baptist preacher famous for plainspokenness, it’s theology as refusal. Sin isn’t a sliding scale you can game. It’s a boundary.

The intent is pastoral but also combative. Spurgeon preached in an industrial, rapidly urbanizing Britain where respectable society often dressed compromise up as practicality: a bit of dishonesty for stability, a bit of cruelty for order, a bit of vice with a charitable veneer. His phrasing weaponizes simplicity. Two evils presented as the only options is already a manipulation, and Spurgeon’s answer is to reject the frame. That’s the subtext: the “choice” is frequently a trap laid by appetite, peer pressure, or institutions that profit from your resignation.

There’s also an implied confidence in a third path. Spurgeon isn’t naïve about consequence; he’s asserting that moral agency includes the power to abstain, to endure loss, to look for an alternative even when the room insists there isn’t one. The line works because it’s not merely about purity; it’s about freedom. Don’t bargain with what deforms you, even if the bargain comes with a receipt that says “necessary.”