Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas W. Higginson

A clergyman praising humor as a shield against misery is a quiet theological pivot: salvation, in Higginson's telling, isn’t only earned through solemn endurance but through a practiced ability to laugh when life turns predatory. The key word is habitual. He isn’t recommending a one-off joke to break the tension; he’s arguing for a cultivated reflex, a mental posture that meets catastrophe with a kind of disciplined irreverence. That framing matters because it relocates “defense” from the world (where fortune can’t be negotiated with) to the self (where interpretation can).

The subtext is almost pastoral strategy. “Adverse fortune” is a polite Victorian umbrella for grief, poverty, illness, public shame - the stuff a nineteenth-century congregation would meet without modern safety nets. Humor becomes a democratic tool: portable, free, available even when every external resource is gone. It doesn’t fix the problem; it keeps the problem from owning the inner life. By calling it “effectual,” Higginson borrows the language of medicine and moral instruction, making humor sound less like frivolity and more like spiritual hygiene.

Context sharpens the intent. Higginson lived through civil conflict, abolitionist struggle, and rapid social change; he also moved in literary circles that valued wit as intelligence under pressure. The line smuggles a radical consolation into respectable phrasing: if the universe won’t guarantee fairness, at least you can refuse to grant it total authority over your mood.