"The devil had as good have let Paul alone, for he no sooner comes into prison but he falls a preaching, at which the gates of Satan's prison fly open, and poor sinners come forth"
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Nothing terrifies tyranny like a captive who won’t shut up. Gurnall turns the prison cell into a pulpit and makes the devil look like a bad warden who picked the wrong inmate. The line is built on a swaggering paradox: Paul is locked up, yet the real doors swinging open are Satan’s. That reversal is the engine of the quote’s power. It doesn’t argue that suffering can be redeemed; it stages a jailbreak in the imagination, with preaching as the crowbar.
Gurnall, a Puritan divine writing in an age when religion and authority were welded together, knows his audience lives under the pressure of conformity, censorship, and the ever-present fear that faith will be punished or sidelined. So he reframes persecution as strategic error. If the enemy tries to silence the gospel by force, the gospel simply changes venues. Prison becomes publicity. Constraint becomes concentration. The devil “had as good have let Paul alone” because opposition doesn’t merely fail; it backfires, producing conversions (“poor sinners come forth”) as collateral damage.
The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Pastoral, because it comforts believers who feel trapped: your confinement doesn’t negate your calling; it may sharpen it. Political, because it smuggles in a doctrine of spiritual insurgency: the state (or any power) can restrain bodies, not testimony. Gurnall’s Satan is less a horned monster than a systems manager whose apparatus collapses the moment an unbroken voice starts speaking.
Gurnall, a Puritan divine writing in an age when religion and authority were welded together, knows his audience lives under the pressure of conformity, censorship, and the ever-present fear that faith will be punished or sidelined. So he reframes persecution as strategic error. If the enemy tries to silence the gospel by force, the gospel simply changes venues. Prison becomes publicity. Constraint becomes concentration. The devil “had as good have let Paul alone” because opposition doesn’t merely fail; it backfires, producing conversions (“poor sinners come forth”) as collateral damage.
The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Pastoral, because it comforts believers who feel trapped: your confinement doesn’t negate your calling; it may sharpen it. Political, because it smuggles in a doctrine of spiritual insurgency: the state (or any power) can restrain bodies, not testimony. Gurnall’s Satan is less a horned monster than a systems manager whose apparatus collapses the moment an unbroken voice starts speaking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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