"The crafty person is always in danger; and when they think they walk in the dark, all their pretenses are transparent"
About this Quote
Tillotson’s warning lands like a moral floodlight: craftiness isn’t just wrong, it’s structurally unstable. The “crafty person” lives in permanent exposure because deception demands continuous control of the room, the story, the other people’s attention. That’s the danger he’s naming - not merely divine punishment someday, but the everyday precariousness of a life built on misdirection. You can’t relax inside a lie; you can only manage it, and management eventually fails.
The line’s bite is in its staging. Craftiness imagines itself as nocturnal, moving “in the dark,” protected by secrecy and by other people’s ignorance. Tillotson flips the scene: the darkness is self-deception. The craftiest figure believes they have privacy, but their “pretenses are transparent” precisely because pretense has tells - the overexplained alibi, the performative humility, the selective candor. He’s arguing that moral reality has a kind of visibility that doesn’t depend on lighting. Even when human audiences are fooled, the act of pretending reshapes the pretender into someone legible: anxious, calculating, divided.
As a Restoration-era Anglican theologian and preacher, Tillotson is speaking into a culture of court intrigue, factional politics, and public religious posturing. His target isn’t only petty tricksters; it’s the respectable hypocrite. The subtext is pastoral and political: a community can survive open disagreement, but it corrodes under strategic insincerity. The quote works because it turns cunning into a liability, stripping it of glamour and making honesty look not naive, but durable.
The line’s bite is in its staging. Craftiness imagines itself as nocturnal, moving “in the dark,” protected by secrecy and by other people’s ignorance. Tillotson flips the scene: the darkness is self-deception. The craftiest figure believes they have privacy, but their “pretenses are transparent” precisely because pretense has tells - the overexplained alibi, the performative humility, the selective candor. He’s arguing that moral reality has a kind of visibility that doesn’t depend on lighting. Even when human audiences are fooled, the act of pretending reshapes the pretender into someone legible: anxious, calculating, divided.
As a Restoration-era Anglican theologian and preacher, Tillotson is speaking into a culture of court intrigue, factional politics, and public religious posturing. His target isn’t only petty tricksters; it’s the respectable hypocrite. The subtext is pastoral and political: a community can survive open disagreement, but it corrodes under strategic insincerity. The quote works because it turns cunning into a liability, stripping it of glamour and making honesty look not naive, but durable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
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