Faith & Spirit Quote by Francis Atterbury

Stubbornness, Atterbury suggests, isn’t a problem of information; it’s a problem of will. The line is engineered to sound like a cool assessment of human nature, but it’s also a power move: it pre-emptively disqualifies dissent. If Scripture doesn’t bring you to “believe and live as [you] ought,” then nothing will - not even the ultimate spectacle, a courier “sent express from the other world.” The hypothetical messenger is a rhetorical trap: it flatters the faithful as reasonable and paints skeptics as constitutionally unreachable.

That’s the subtext doing the heavy lifting. Atterbury isn’t merely defending revelation; he’s defending the authority structure that comes with it. “Believe and live” couples doctrine to behavior, making compliance the real test. The punchline is psychological: disbelief becomes less an intellectual position than a moral diagnosis, a kind of chosen blindness. In a political register, that’s invaluable. If opponents are not just wrong but impervious to “any evidence whatever,” you’re freed from the burden of persuasion and justified in treating debate as theater.

Context matters. Atterbury was a high-church Anglican cleric and a hard-edged political operator, eventually entangled in Jacobite plotting and exiled. In early 18th-century Britain, religious allegiance and political legitimacy were intertwined; arguments about “evidence” weren’t happening in a seminar room but in a contested public sphere. The quote is a defense of order disguised as epistemology: if revelation can’t govern you, nothing should be allowed to.