War & Peace Quote by John Woolman

Grace arrives here not as a warm bath but as a moral spotlight, and Woolman stands in it without flinching. The sentence is built like a spiritual case file: mercy given, peace spoken, distress relieved - and then the damning pivot, "most ungratefully", where he refuses the usual alibis. He doesn't blame temptation, bad company, or weak flesh. He names the real scandal in a religious life: receiving comfort and still choosing "folly", not out of ignorance but out of a kind of willed amnesia.

The subtext is psychological and, for a Quaker minister, pointedly communal. Woolman isn't performing private guilt for its own sake; he's modeling the anatomy of backsliding as a warning to the reader. Even "sharp reproof" is described clinically, like pain that should have prompted treatment. The phrase "did not get low enough" is the key. It implies a threshold of humility he never crossed, a bottom he avoided hitting. Distress can be a doorway to dependence, but he admits to maintaining just enough self-possession to keep control - and therefore to keep God at a safe distance.

Context matters: Woolman writes from an 18th-century Quaker world that prized inward scrutiny and plain honesty, and his journal often turns confession into social ethics (slavery, consumption, complicity). This passage foreshadows that larger project: the refusal to let momentary spiritual comfort become an excuse to return to the old, convenient life.