Faith & Spirit Quote by Jonathan Edwards

Edwards makes prayer sound less like a pious hobby and more like a biological reflex. The comparison to breathing is doing strategic work: it quietly demotes prayer from “religious practice” to “sign of being alive.” If you have faith, you pray the way lungs take in air. If you don’t pray, the implication isn’t just that you’re distracted or undisciplined; it’s that something is spiritually inert.

That hard edge fits Edwards’s world. As a leading voice in the First Great Awakening, he preached in an atmosphere charged with revivalist urgency and anxiety about “mere” formal religion. In that context, prayer becomes evidence - not performance. The line aims at churchgoers who could recite doctrine yet remain emotionally untouched, a concern Edwards dramatized in sermons that treated inner transformation as the real test of Christianity. He’s offering a diagnostic: prayer is what faith does when it’s real.

The subtext also smuggles in an ideal of spontaneity. “Natural expression” suggests the truest prayer rises unforced, before it becomes polished speech or social signal. That’s a corrective to religion as etiquette. But it’s also a subtle pressure tactic: if prayer is natural, then failure to pray can feel like self-indictment rather than a solvable problem of time, habit, or doubt.

Rhetorically, Edwards chooses a metaphor that’s hard to argue with because it bypasses theology and goes straight to embodiment. Breathing is constant, intimate, nonnegotiable. He’s not just describing devotion; he’s redefining faith as something that must metabolize into action, or it isn’t faith at all.