Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Cecil

Self-will, in Richard Cecil's hands, isn’t the healthy backbone of Protestant conscience; it’s appetite dressed up as principle, an engine so over-cranked it will vandalize reality for the pettiest comfort. The line works because it compresses a whole moral psychology into a domestic absurdity: not a throne, not a cathedral, just a stool. Cecil turns pride into carpentry. The image is funny in a dark, clerical way, and that humor is the trap: you laugh at the disproportion, then realize he’s describing something uncomfortably ordinary.

The intent is pastoral warning with teeth. As an Evangelical-era Anglican clergyman writing in a culture increasingly animated by commerce, individual advancement, and political upheaval, Cecil aims at the modernizing temptation to treat the world as raw material for the self. “Ardent and active” is crucial; he’s not condemning laziness or weakness, but the kind of energetic determination that looks, from the outside, like virtue. The subtext is that vice often borrows the outward posture of strength.

“Break a world to pieces” pushes the stakes beyond personal sin into collateral damage: families fractured, communities rearranged, institutions bent, conscience rationalized. The stool is the tell. Self-will doesn’t need grandeur; it needs control. Cecil implies that unchecked autonomy is not freedom but a tantrum with a toolbox, converting creation into convenience. In a religious context, it’s also an implicit critique of making the self sovereign - replacing God’s order with a tiny, custom-built seat for the ego.