Life & Mortality Quote by John Strachan

A clean piece of clerical rhetoric: take suffering, strip it of its randomness, and rebrand it as proof of belonging. Strachan frames persecution not as a tragic cost but as a chosen fidelity, a posture so disciplined it becomes cheerful. That adverb is doing the heavy lifting. “Cheerfully” isn’t a mood report; it’s an instruction, an emotional policy for the faithful. If you can meet “privation,” “contumely and disgrace,” even “death itself” with calm assent, then the world’s power to shame you collapses. Martyrdom becomes not merely endurance but victory-by-refusal.

The structure is a crescendo of degradations: material loss, social contempt, public dishonor, bodily extinction. Each step narrows the reader’s options until the only remaining thing you can keep is “the love of Christ” - and Strachan makes that the only thing worth keeping. It’s an argument designed for community formation. Shared suffering, narrated as voluntary and even upbeat, hardens a group’s identity and draws a bright line between insiders (steadfast) and outsiders (the agents of “contumely”).

Context matters: Strachan, an Anglican bishop and a leading voice in early Canadian colonial society, wrote in a world where churches were institutions competing for authority, loyalty, and legitimacy. This kind of sentence functions like recruitment and social glue at once. It sanctifies endurance, dignifies marginalization, and warns the wavering: if you fall away, it’s not because the cost was high, but because your love was thin.