Wit & Attitude Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Mayhew is doing something sly: he wraps a political threat in the respectable robes of pastoral common sense. On its face, he’s observing human nature - people tolerate bad rule longer than they should. Underneath, he’s giving his listeners moral permission to stop tolerating it, and he’s doing it with a sharp prod: if you are truly “abused and oppressed” and still won’t object, you’re not virtuous, you’re “stupid.”

The line’s intent is to reverse the usual sermon logic of patience and submission. As a clergyman in the pre-Revolutionary Atlantic world, Mayhew is arguing that obedience is conditional, not sacred. “Governors” are not automatically God’s instruments; they are fallible managers who can forfeit legitimacy through misconduct. That’s a radical move in an era when many sermons reinforced hierarchy as a spiritual duty. He doesn’t need to name a king to make the target obvious.

The subtext is strategic escalation. Mayhew concedes that complaint is rare until harm is undeniable, which subtly normalizes delay and fear: of course people hesitate. Then he flips it into a civic test. Once oppression is clear, silence becomes a failure of judgment. It’s a neat rhetorical trap: if you disagree, you’re defending oppression; if you agree, you’re obliged to act.

Context matters: Mayhew’s world is thick with imperial overreach, local grievances, and anxieties about arbitrary power. The sentence primes a community to see resistance not as rebellion, but as sanity - and, crucially, as a moral obligation.