Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

The line sounds modest, but it’s also a quiet bid for authority: you matter most when you stop claiming ownership of what makes you matter. Fosdick, a leading liberal Protestant preacher in the early 20th century, is writing from a world where traditional religious certainty was being battered by modern science, urbanization, and the trauma of world war. In that climate, “power” couldn’t credibly mean brute dominance or doctrinal muscle. It had to be reframed as moral force.

The phrasing does the work. “Not so much in us” deflates the heroic, self-made individual that modernity loves to crown. “As through us” restores significance without turning it into ego. It’s a rhetorical two-step: humility first, then elevation. Fosdick suggests the self is less a reservoir than a conduit, a moral instrument rather than the moral source. The subtext is theological, but it doubles as a psychological strategy. If you experience courage, clarity, or endurance as something moving through you, you’re less likely to break under the pressure of having to generate it alone.

There’s also an institutional argument hiding inside the spiritual one. Clergy in Fosdick’s era were competing with new secular voices for cultural influence. This line recasts religious leadership as facilitation rather than control: the minister isn’t powerful because he commands, but because he helps transmit a larger purpose into ordinary life. It’s a democratic vision of grace, and a savvy answer to modern suspicion: the ego isn’t the engine; it’s the channel.