Leadership Quote by Arthur Middleton

Middleton’s sentence reads like a pastoral mission statement, but it’s also a piece of political engineering. “Introduce our people into the life of the Church” isn’t mere invitation; it’s a program for social formation. The verb matters: you introduce someone to a world they don’t yet inhabit, a set of habits, hierarchies, and loyalties. For an 18th-century politician in the Anglophone Atlantic, the Church isn’t only a spiritual refuge; it’s a public institution that disciplines time (Sabbath), behavior (morals), and belonging (who counts as “our people”).

The tight equation “the life of the Church, which is salvation” collapses any gap between personal faith and institutional participation. Salvation is framed less as a private experience than as enrollment in a living body with “contents and purpose.” That triad has the cadence of civic instruction: meaning (why it exists), contents (what it teaches), purpose (what it produces). It’s catechesis, but it also sounds like nation-building, turning scattered individuals into a coherent community with shared narratives.

The sensory turn at the end - “taste and see how good the Lord is” - is rhetorically savvy. It borrows the authority of scripture while shifting the appeal from argument to experience. Don’t debate; try it. The subtext is that once people are habituated into the Church’s life, the conclusion (“how good”) will feel self-evident.

In a revolutionary-era world where legitimacy was contested, Middleton is wagering that religious formation can stabilize a political order: make citizens by making churchgoers, bind the spiritual to the social, and call the result “salvation.”