Daily Inspiration Quote by George Gillespie

Sin, for Gillespie, is rarely just a problem of appetite; it is a problem of mis-seeing. Writing as a hard-edged Reformed theologian in the white heat of the British civil wars and the Westminster Assembly, he treats the human will less like a rogue animal and more like a compass that reliably points wherever the mind has already decided north must be. That is the provocation in his claim that there is no “sinfulness in the will and affections” without “some error in the understanding”: moral collapse begins as intellectual collapse.

The intent is surgical. Gillespie isn’t excusing vice as mere naivete; he’s tightening the indictment. “Lusts of ignorance” frames sin as culpable blindness, the kind that comes from suppressing or distorting what one ought to know about God, self, and the good. In classic Calvinist fashion, ignorance isn’t neutral absence of information; it’s an active disorder of perception. People don’t simply choose the wrong thing; they choose it because their understanding has been bent to make the wrong thing look plausible, even righteous.

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Pastoral, because the remedy implied isn’t only stronger willpower but re-formation of the mind: preaching, catechesis, discipline, the slow retraining of conscience. Political, because in a moment obsessed with national “reformation,” errors in understanding weren’t private quirks; they were combustible public forces. If false doctrine breeds disordered desire, then controlling the sources of understanding - pulpits, schools, liturgy - becomes a moral emergency. Gillespie’s line works because it refuses the comforting myth of “victimless” sin: every craving carries a theory of reality inside it, and bad theories don’t stay in the head.