Time & Perspective Quote by George A. Smith

The enemy, George A. Smith argues, is not an invading army or a rival church but a private insurgency: the parts of ourselves that refuse to stay buried. It’s a clerical pivot that quietly reroutes moral panic away from the outside world and back into the sanctuary of the mind. In the mid-19th century, when American religious life was thick with revivalist urgency and public codes of respectability, Smith is pressing a harder claim: the real battlefront isn’t the frontier or the city street, it’s memory.

The line works because it weaponizes psychology before “psychology” was a cultural default. “Evil deeds and their memories” is the key coupling. Sin doesn’t end at the act; it reproduces itself as replay, as shame, as the anxious knowledge that you can outpace consequences but not recollection. Then he stacks the culprits - pride, selfishness, malice, passions - not as colorful vices but as a pursuing pack. “By conscience or by habit” is a bleakly modern insight: even if your moral compass goes quiet, your routines can still drag you back to the same harm. Repentance isn’t just a spiritual turn; it’s a rewiring.

Smith also slips in a rhetorical confession of failure: “past the power of figure to express.” He admits language can’t fully render the relentlessness, which paradoxically makes the relentlessness feel more credible. For a clergyman, it’s a strategic move: the sermon isn’t selling fear of God’s punishment so much as fear of your own unescapable self.