Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison rigs this line like a courtroom flourish: it pretends to defend humility while smuggling in a trap. By redefining "faith" as any leap beyond absolute proof, he flips a common accusation on its head. The believer, in his framing, is merely "receiving" truths already loaded with grandeur and authority; the atheist is the reckless gambler, forced into a more strenuous, almost heroic credulity. It is a neat piece of rhetorical jujitsu, less about theology than about who gets to claim the mantle of reason.

The subtext is social as much as spiritual. Early 18th-century England treated open atheism not as a private opinion but as a kind of civic vandalism: an affront to moral order, political legitimacy, and the shared language of virtue. Addison, a polished public moralist of the Spectator era, writes to an audience that likes its piety sensible and its skepticism domesticated. Calling atheism "faith" delegitimizes it by implying it cannot be rationally grounded; it must be a stubborn commitment against obvious evidence.

The word "indefinitely" does extra work. It suggests atheism isn't just wrong but endlessly, needlessly burdensome - a position that must keep inventing new acts of belief to patch over the world's meaning. It's a confidence game, delivered with urbane calm: the reader is invited to feel reasonable, modern, and devout all at once.