Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Middleton

Calling the Incarnation a "medicine" is a political mind reaching for clinical clarity: Christianity, here, is not mood or metaphor but treatment. Arthur Middleton lived in an age when bodies were routinely bled, purged, and dosed; medicine was tangible, sometimes brutal, and always administered by authorized hands. He borrows that world to make a pointed claim about spiritual authority. If the Fall is an injury, then grace is not self-help. It is a remedy delivered through a regulated channel.

The sentence quietly tightens the chain of custody. The Incarnation does the cosmic work "undoing the Fall", but the individual access point is institutional: "the office of a priest" whose job is to "administer". That verb matters. It turns salvation from an abstract doctrine into a managed practice, and it frames sacraments less as personal expression than as prescribed therapy. In a Protestant-heavy, post-Enlightenment Atlantic culture suspicious of clerical power, Middleton is staking ground for a high-church, sacramental Christianity that insists the church is not optional infrastructure. The priest is not a motivational speaker; he is closer to a physician with a license.

"Tree of Life" supplies the biblical image of restored communion, but it also works as a subtle counter to the era's confidence in reason and republican virtue. For a politician amid revolution-era arguments about who has legitimate authority, Middleton is rehearsing a parallel argument in theology: true restoration is not seized; it is received, through an office, in rites that claim ancient continuity. The subtext is unmistakably anti-DIY. Redemption is not a private opinion. It's a public dispensation.