Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Cecil

Cecil compresses an entire library of unruly, contradictory lives into a single pious algorithm: know God, then yield. The bluntness is the point. By calling biblical figures "great characters", he borrows the language of literature and theatre, reminding listeners that Scripture is populated by recognizable personalities, not abstract doctrines. Then he strips their complexity down to a moral through-line that can be imitated. This is not history as reportage; it is history as spiritual coaching.

The key verb is "acquiesced". It implies consent, but a consent that is quieter than enthusiasm and sturdier than mood. Cecil is coaching his audience away from the romantic idea of faith as perpetual inspiration and toward obedience as a practiced posture. "Acquainted themselves with God" also suggests intimacy built over time, not a one-time conversion event. The sentence makes sanctity feel less like heroic exception and more like a discipline available to ordinary people, if they will submit their preferences.

The subtext is polemical in a late-18th-century Anglican way. Cecil, an evangelical within a church marked by decorum and rational religion, is pushing back against faith reduced to moral respectability or intellectual assent. Biblical "greatness", he implies, isn't charisma, status, or even giftedness; it's alignment. Even the Bible's celebrated figures, with all their failures, are redeemed in Cecil's retelling by a single habit: letting God's will have the final word "in all things". It's a totalizing demand, and that totality is the sermon.