Fatherhood Quote by David Brainerd

Brainerd writes like a man trying to make salvation feel less like a doctrine and more like an emergency. “All-seeing eye” lands first: not a comforting gaze, but surveillance with moral consequence. The phrase “our deplorable state” doesn’t invite self-esteem; it demands a verdict. In the revivalist Protestant world Brainerd inhabited, you didn’t drift into grace by good habits. You were first made to feel the cliff edge: human incapacity, spiritual sickness, the inability to repair yourself by effort or refinement.

Then comes the turn that makes the sentence work. The cosmic inspection doesn’t end in disgust; it triggers “infinite pity.” Brainerd’s God is not a detached judge but “the Father of mercies,” a title doing quiet rhetorical labor: it frames mercy as family resemblance, not occasional exception. Yet the next move refuses sentimentality. Pity alone could be mere softness; Brainerd anchors it with “infinite wisdom” that “laid the plan.” Salvation is presented as engineered, not improvised. The “plan of our recovery” has the flavor of a rescue operation: triage, design, execution.

Subtext: Brainerd is disciplining the reader’s emotional arc. First, humility (you are seen and found wanting). Then, relief (pity meets you). Finally, trust (wisdom is in charge). For a missionary who spent himself preaching to Native communities and chronicling his own frailty, this is also self-portraiture: a theology calibrated to suffering bodies and anxious consciences, insisting that grace is not a mood in God but a deliberate act aimed at the undone.