Faith & Spirit Quote by Saint Francis de Sales

Undervaluing someone, Saint Francis de Sales suggests, is not just rude; it's bad metaphysics. He starts with the most everyday sting he can find: the workman who bristles when his craft is mocked to his face. That image does quiet rhetorical heavy lifting. It translates an abstract Christian ethic into a workplace social fact: contempt is an insult aimed past the object and into the maker. The pivot that follows - God is present everywhere - turns casual scorn into a kind of sacrilege, because the “presence” is not ceremonial. It’s ambient. You don’t get to step outside it.

The intent is disciplinary and pastoral, aimed at ordinary believers who might treat charity as a Sunday posture and hierarchy as a weekday habit. De Sales, writing in the wake of the Reformation and during the Catholic Church’s internal reform push, specialized in a practical spirituality meant for laypeople navigating courts, trades, and family life. This line fits that project: it pressures the reader to recognize that social status can’t be the metric of worth when every human is already framed as divine workmanship.

The subtext is also strategic: he avoids sentimental equality talk and instead uses pride against itself. If you demand respect for your own labor, you’ve already accepted the rule; de Sales simply universalizes it. The result is a moral trapdoor: contempt for “lesser” people becomes contempt for the Creator who is, inconveniently, always “in the room.”