Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert South

South is warning you that the weird isn’t just morally suspect; it’s cognitively destabilizing. “Boggles” is doing heavy work here. It’s not a polite disagreement or even a theological objection. It’s the moment the intellect hits a wall, recoils, and starts to mistrust its own categories. For a 17th-century Anglican clergyman preaching in the wake of civil war, regicide, and the churn of new science, that’s a pointed claim: novelty isn’t merely dangerous because it’s sinful, but because it scrambles the basic grammar of reality.

The phrase “unnatural substances” reads like chemistry, but in South’s mouth it’s also social and spiritual: experiments in doctrine, ethics, and political order that claim to improve on what God (and tradition) built. Calling them “paradoxical and incomprehensible” frames dissent as not just wrong but unintelligible - a move that delegitimizes it before argument even begins. If the mind “begins” to boggle, the implication is that sustained exposure to the unnatural produces a slide from confusion to error to collapse.

The subtext is pastoral and polemical at once. South is defending a world where “nature” is not a neutral description but a moral boundary, a set of limits that protect human reason from its own vanity. The rhetoric flatters the listener’s sanity: if you can’t make sense of the “unnatural,” that isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s evidence you’re still properly ordered. In an era fascinated by anomalies and “new philosophies,” the line functions like an immune response, turning bewilderment into a virtue.