Daily Inspiration Quote by John Owen

Habit is the stealthiest accomplice in moral collapse, and Owen wants you to feel how quickly it anesthetizes the nerve endings of conscience. “The custom of sinning” isn’t just repetition; it’s training. Do a thing often enough and the inner alarm that once screamed begins to whisper, then goes silent. The line is built on a chilling logic: sin doesn’t merely break rules, it rewires perception. You stop experiencing the act as transgression because you’ve practiced your way out of sensitivity.

Then Owen widens the indictment from the individual to the social climate. “The course of the world” suggests a current you can float in without choosing it: norms, fashions, incentives, the quiet consensus that certain compromises are simply how life works. That’s where the “shame” goes. Shame is social as much as spiritual; it depends on an audience that still blushes. When everyone is doing it, shame looks like naivete, even bad manners. Owen is diagnosing what we’d now call normalization: private vice becomes public routine, and the community’s moral vocabulary shrinks until it can no longer name what’s happening.

Context matters. As a 17th-century Puritan divine, Owen is writing in the wake of civil war, religious faction, and political whiplash, when “the world” felt both unstable and seductively accommodating. His intent is pastoral but also surgical: to warn that the gravest danger isn’t dramatic evil, it’s the slow drift where conscience is dulled, and culture provides cover. The quote works because it refuses comfort; it treats moral perception as something you can lose, not just something you violate.