"The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it"
About this Quote
Prayer gets demoted here from spiritual vending machine to moral gym. Robertson, a Victorian clergyman with a pastor's eye for what people quietly want from religion, refuses the transactional bargain: piety in exchange for comfort, safety, and good outcomes. His sentence is built like a set of crossed wires - "not... but..". twice over - and that rhetorical repetition is the point. It mimics the discipline he's prescribing: the mind keeps reaching for relief, and the speaker keeps steering it back toward endurance.
The intent is corrective, even slightly scolding, but not cold. Robertson is protecting prayer from becoming a technique for controlling life. If prayer is mainly a way to "obtain" or "escape", then God becomes a lever and suffering becomes evidence of failure. His reframing preserves dignity under pressure: hardship doesn't prove you prayed wrong; it becomes the arena where prayer has its real work.
The subtext is pastoral realism. Mid-19th-century Britain is full of industrial dislocation, disease, and class strain; "evil" isn't abstract, it's contagious illness, bereavement, poverty, moral panic. Robertson offers a theology that can survive contact with that world. Instead of promising immunity, he promises nerve.
What makes the line land is its inversion of religious expectation. It asks the reader to trade outcomes for character, relief for resilience, the fantasy of exemption for the tougher consolation of strength. Prayer, in this frame, is not an escape hatch. It's the training that makes you harder to break.
The intent is corrective, even slightly scolding, but not cold. Robertson is protecting prayer from becoming a technique for controlling life. If prayer is mainly a way to "obtain" or "escape", then God becomes a lever and suffering becomes evidence of failure. His reframing preserves dignity under pressure: hardship doesn't prove you prayed wrong; it becomes the arena where prayer has its real work.
The subtext is pastoral realism. Mid-19th-century Britain is full of industrial dislocation, disease, and class strain; "evil" isn't abstract, it's contagious illness, bereavement, poverty, moral panic. Robertson offers a theology that can survive contact with that world. Instead of promising immunity, he promises nerve.
What makes the line land is its inversion of religious expectation. It asks the reader to trade outcomes for character, relief for resilience, the fantasy of exemption for the tougher consolation of strength. Prayer, in this frame, is not an escape hatch. It's the training that makes you harder to break.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
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