Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Rainy

Rare doesn’t mean true, but it does mean consequential - and Robert Rainy is carefully calibrating that distinction. As a 19th-century clergyman, he’s speaking from inside an institutional religion that had already weathered centuries of schisms, revivals, and “new lights.” His phrasing treats religious innovation like a seismic event: unusual, disruptive, and therefore worth sober attention. “Serious and impressive claims” is a loaded filter. Rainy isn’t describing every charismatic sect or local revival; he’s narrowing the field to movements that arrive with the audacity of a full-stack alternative to established authority: a “new revelation from on high.”

The sentence performs restraint as a kind of power. It refuses the sensationalism that new movements often thrive on, and it refuses the complacency of simply dismissing them as crackpotry. That middle posture is the tell. Rainy is signaling to educated believers that modernity will keep producing rival truth-systems - and that the church’s response must be intellectual, not merely disciplinary. The subtext is institutional self-defense dressed as fairness: by framing new religions as infrequent, he reassures his audience that the floodgates aren’t open; by granting their claims a “serious and impressive” sheen, he concedes they may attract the thoughtful, not just the gullible.

Context matters: the 1800s were a factory for religious novelty (new denominations, restorationist projects, global missions, spiritualism), and Christian Europe was newly aware of other world religions as living competitors. Rainy’s line quietly admits that revelation is no longer a closed question in the public square - it’s a contested market, and the church must argue, not assume.