Daily Inspiration Quote by Geoffrey Fisher

It reads like a warning delivered in a church voice: calm, measured, and quietly absolute. Fisher’s line doesn’t argue that inclusion is wrong; it argues that inclusion is destabilizing. “Once you start” frames the initial act of opening the door as a point of no return, a small concession that triggers an endless chain of claims, petitions, edge cases. The sentence is built to make the listener feel administrative fatigue before any moral debate can even begin.

The subtext is boundary maintenance. Fisher, as a senior Anglican cleric in a period when Britain was renegotiating class, empire, and social norms, is speaking from an institution whose authority relies on clear categories: member and outsider, orthodox and heterodox, respectable and suspect. “Who is to go in and who is to be left out” turns people into a sorting problem, shifting the focus from their needs to the institution’s burden of decision. It’s a clever rhetorical pivot: if inclusion becomes an infinite process, then exclusion can present itself as the only workable alternative.

There’s also a preemptive strike against reformers. The line implies that any attempt to redraw boundaries will invite accusations of inconsistency: if you admit one group, why not the next? It’s the logic that props up status quo power everywhere from immigration debates to church governance to social policy. Fisher’s intent is less theological than procedural: make openness sound like chaos, and you won’t need to justify closed gates on their merits.