Love Quote by Charles Simeon

Simeon is doing something quietly radical for an Anglican clergyman in an age that prized poise, polish, and social respectability: he’s ranking emotional and spiritual collapse above comfort. “Tender heart” and “broken and contrite spirit” aren’t Hallmark virtues here; they’re the Evangelical badges of authenticity, the inner evidence that grace has actually done its disruptive work. The line flatters no one who’s doing fine.

The phrasing pulls from Psalm-saturated Christianity where God doesn’t want the impressive offering so much as the ruined ego. Simeon’s intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because he’s giving permission to the scraped raw people in the pews: your sorrow isn’t a detour from the good life, it might be the doorway. Polemical, because it downgrades “joys” as the world defines them - status, ease, the mild moral glow of being respectable - and replaces them with an inward posture that can’t be faked for an audience.

“Vale of tears” sharpens the wager. This isn’t a bid for permanent gloom; it’s a diagnosis of the present order as fallen and therefore incapable of delivering the kind of joy worth trusting. In Simeon’s context - late 18th/early 19th-century Anglicanism, with Evangelical revival pressing against genteel religion - the quote is a manifesto for sincerity over decorum. He’s insisting that the most valuable thing a person can bring to God is not achievement but surrender, not self-mastery but self-knowledge that hurts.