Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Inglis

To fear God is doing double duty here: it’s a devotional instruction and a social technology. Charles Inglis, an Anglican clergyman best known as a Loyalist voice in the American revolutionary era, isn’t urging jittery superstition so much as underwriting a whole moral and political order. “Fear” functions as a disciplined posture toward authority: the cosmic sovereign stands behind the earthly one. For a preacher speaking to “rational Creatures,” the phrase is a calculated reconciliation of Enlightenment self-image with traditional hierarchy. You can be rational, he implies, and still accept that your reason terminates in obedience.

The wording is telling. “Duties” frames religion as obligation, not personal therapy or private meaning. “First and greatest” isn’t pious exaggeration; it’s prioritization. If fear of God outranks everything else, then competing loyalties - to conscience, to community, to revolutionary ideals - become secondary by definition. It’s a preemptive strike against dissent: disobedience is no longer just politics, it’s impiety.

The subtext also flatters the listener. By calling humans “rational,” Inglis recruits the educated and the wavering, suggesting that the sophisticated person will recognize fear as reasonable. In a moment when old certainties were being audited by pamphlets, parliaments, and rebels, he offers an anchor: liberty without a divine ceiling becomes license. The quote works because it compresses theology into a behavioral command, one that keeps the soul in line and, conveniently, keeps the world in line too.