Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison opens by flattering heaven, then snaps the leash onto everyone else. Perfect justice, he says, belongs to God; humans get no such alibi. The line is a neat piece of moral engineering from an early-18th-century writer steeped in Anglican restraint and the civility project of the Enlightenment. By conceding that absolute justice is unattainable for mortals, he lowers the bar just enough to make striving plausible. Then he raises the stakes: the attempt itself becomes our "glory". It is ambition with guardrails.

The subtext is as political as it is pious. In Addison's Britain, "justice" isn't an abstract virtue; it's the legitimacy of courts, Parliament, and a social order still anxious about faction, corruption, and the aftershocks of revolution. Claiming divinity alone can be perfectly just does two things at once: it deflates the zealot who thinks he's God's instrument, and it chastens the powerful who confuse their interests with the moral law. No one gets to pose as flawless. Everyone is still obligated.

The phrasing matters. "Perfectly" and "divine nature" evoke an unreachable standard, while "utmost of our abilities" turns ethics into discipline and effort rather than purity. Addison isn't selling sainthood; he's selling a civic posture: measured, self-scrutinizing, reform-minded. Justice becomes less a verdict you pronounce on others and more a daily practice that proves you're fit to live among them.