"The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak"
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Faith is framed here less as a halo than as a lever: its force becomes legible precisely where a person lacks the usual scaffolding of willpower, charisma, or toughness. Augustus Hare isn’t praising weakness for its own sake; he’s describing the narrative mechanics of Victorian moral life, where virtue is most convincing when it arrives without the props of “natural” strength. A confident, disciplined character who believes can look like a believer by temperament. A fragile, easily swayed character who persists in belief turns faith into an active ingredient, not a decorative trait.
The line carries a quiet rebuke to the era’s cult of self-help before self-help had a name. In a culture increasingly enchanted by industry, respectability, and muscular Christianity, Hare suggests that inner deficit can be the very stage on which spiritual power performs. That’s both consoling and strategically moralizing: consoling because it grants dignity to the anxious, the indecisive, the socially marginal; moralizing because it implies that strength without faith is aesthetically unimpressive, maybe even spiritually suspect.
Subtextually, he’s also defending a kind of evidentiary standard. Faith “shines forth” when it produces observable steadiness in someone who otherwise would fold. The claim is almost anti-romantic: belief isn’t proved by ecstasy or grand declarations but by the unlikely durability it generates in the weak. In that sense, Hare turns weakness into a test case and faith into a measurable kind of courage.
The line carries a quiet rebuke to the era’s cult of self-help before self-help had a name. In a culture increasingly enchanted by industry, respectability, and muscular Christianity, Hare suggests that inner deficit can be the very stage on which spiritual power performs. That’s both consoling and strategically moralizing: consoling because it grants dignity to the anxious, the indecisive, the socially marginal; moralizing because it implies that strength without faith is aesthetically unimpressive, maybe even spiritually suspect.
Subtextually, he’s also defending a kind of evidentiary standard. Faith “shines forth” when it produces observable steadiness in someone who otherwise would fold. The claim is almost anti-romantic: belief isn’t proved by ecstasy or grand declarations but by the unlikely durability it generates in the weak. In that sense, Hare turns weakness into a test case and faith into a measurable kind of courage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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