Faith & Spirit Quote by John Philpot Curran

Liberty, in Curran's framing, is not a trophy won once and placed in a glass case; it is a lease with brutal terms. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that freedom naturally sustains itself once declared. "Condition" is the pressure point: liberty is contingent, contractual, and revocable. That legalistic phrasing isn’t accidental from a public servant and courtroom orator. It smuggles political realism into the language of providence, as if to say: you may invoke God all you like, but the upkeep is on you.

The God-talk is strategic, not merely pious. In late-18th-century Britain and Ireland, religious vocabulary carried public authority, especially in moral arguments about rights and governance. Curran uses that authority to elevate vigilance from civic preference to sacred obligation. Yet the subtext is almost anti-fatalistic: divine gift or not, liberty can be stolen by ordinary means - complacency, fear, careerist politicians, a public numbed into trading rights for order.

"Eternal vigilance" is deliberately exhausting. Not periodic attention, not election-season outrage: a permanent posture of skepticism toward power. The phrase flatters no one; it implies citizens are always one lapse away from being managed rather than represented. Curran is speaking from a world of suspended habeas corpus, political repression, and imperial anxiety, where "security" was the evergreen justification for overreach. The sentence endures because it treats freedom as a verb, not a noun - something practiced daily, or quietly surrendered.