Love Quote by Edwin Hubbel Chapin

There is a sly provocation in Chapin’s line: it sounds like a compliment to the zealot, but it’s really an indictment of a culture that mistakes detachment for depth. Calling the rational debater “cool and slippery” turns the usual moral hierarchy upside down. Coolness reads as evasive; slipperiness suggests a person who can argue any side and therefore believes none. The “downright fanatic,” by contrast, may be wrong, even dangerous, but at least he is located somewhere - attached to a conviction that has consequences.

As a 19th-century clergyman, Chapin is writing in an era when public life was thick with moral argument: abolition, revivalism, temperance, and the broader Protestant habit of treating politics as a stage for the soul. In that world, the “heart of things” isn’t mere sentiment. It’s the claim that reality has a moral center, and that the most revealing debates are not won by rhetorical agility but by a willingness to stake oneself.

The subtext is pastoral and strategic. Chapin is less interested in endorsing fanaticism than in warning against the anesthetic of endless disputation - the kind of talk that performs intelligence while dodging commitment. He implies that fanaticism is a distorted form of sincerity, while disputation can be a polished form of cowardice. The line works because it catches a modern nerve, too: we still reward the agile contrarian, the pundit who can “both-sides” any crisis, and we still half-suspect that conviction, even when excessive, is closer to the real stakes than cleverness that never risks being pinned down.