Life & Wisdom Quote by Martin Farquhar Tupper

A Victorian confidence trick dressed as physiology, Tupper's line flatters the powerless by giving them a lever. "Slender nerve" is doing the heavy lifting: nerves are small, almost invisible, yet they command entire bodies. By borrowing that bodily logic, he sneaks a bold claim past the reader's skepticism: prayer may look negligible, but it supposedly triggers the ultimate force. The metaphor is tactile and modern for its time, a 19th-century fascination with anatomy repurposed into theology, making devotion feel less like mystic vapor and more like mechanism.

The subtext is psychological and political. If omnipotence has a "muscle", then God's power is not simply a distant absolute; it's a resource that can be activated, almost recruited. Prayer becomes agency for people living in an era of rigid hierarchies and limited civic power: you might not move Parliament or the market, but you can, in this framing, move God. It's also a consolation prize that doubles as discipline. If divine strength is available through prayer, then unanswered prayers can be read as human failure (insufficient faith, insufficient nerve), keeping moral pressure on the believer rather than on providence.

Context matters: Tupper was a hugely popular moralizing writer, not a radical theologian. His talent was packaging piety into quotable, uplifting rhetoric for the Victorian middle class. The sentence works because it turns dependence into dignity, submission into a kind of control, and it does so with the brisk certainty of a proverb that wants to be memorized more than argued with.