Life & Mortality Quote by Thomas Shepard

Shepard’s sentence is a Puritan trapdoor: it starts by naming the casual indifference of the present moment, then yanks the floor away with an apocalypse. The first clause is almost conversational - you, right now, “seest it no great matter” to be separated from Christ. That phrasing matters. Shepard isn’t arguing with an atheist philosopher; he’s targeting the half-churched listener who treats faith as optional, a mood, a social identity. He stages complacency as a perception problem: you think it’s “no great matter” because time is still behaving normally.

Then comes the pivot: “yet when.” It’s a theological jump cut from everyday life to the end of history, where private spiritual distance turns into public consequence. The imagery is not subtle: “the heavens shall be in a flaming fire” and “the earth shall give up the dead.” This is Revelation-style spectacle deployed as pastoral pressure. Shepard’s intent is not to describe the end times for curiosity’s sake, but to make the future invade the present, collapsing procrastination. You can postpone prayer; you can’t reschedule judgment.

The subtext is social as well as spiritual. In 17th-century New England Puritanism, being “separated from Christ” wasn’t merely an interior condition; it threatened the fragile project of a godly community. Shepard leverages fear as a moral technology: not to entertain, but to discipline attention, to reorder priorities, to make salvation feel urgent rather than abstract. The sentence performs what it demands: it won’t let you stay comfortable for long.