Life & Mortality Quote by John Strachan

Pain is almost an afterthought here; memory is the real instrument of judgment. Strachan, a High Church clergyman writing in an era that prized moral order and disciplined self-scrutiny, draws a deliberate contrast between the body’s suffering and the soul’s accounting. “The tortures of present death” sound cinematic, but he treats them as noise. What truly “disturb[s]” the believer is not the spectacle of dying, but the inward replay of “his fall” - that loaded Christian shorthand for sin, backsliding, and the Adamic fracture that makes every person their own evidence.

The phrase “holy sorrow” does the heavy lifting. It’s not despair, not self-pity, not the cheap catharsis of regret. “Holy” reframes grief as productive: a grief that purifies, that testifies to grace by acknowledging distance from it. Strachan’s intent is pastoral and disciplinary at once. He’s offering an ideal deathbed psychology: the faithful person doesn’t bargain with pain or panic at extinction; he is preoccupied with moral clarity, the kind that arrives when distractions drop away.

Subtextually, the line also polices what counts as a “good death.” In Strachan’s Protestant colonial world (he became a major Anglican figure in Canada), piety is proved not by stoic toughness but by correct emotional posture: sorrow, but sanctified; fear, but redirected; suffering, but spiritually demoted. The body can scream. The soul, properly trained, uses even its final minutes for repentance.