Faith & Spirit Quote by George A. Smith

“Breadth and open-air” is a deliberately anti-cloistered image: faith with its windows thrown up, refusing the stuffy piety of back rooms and specialized jargon. George A. Smith, a 19th-century clergyman, is pressing against a familiar religious temptation of his era (and ours): treating God as a Sunday-only subject, accessed through ordained intermediaries, protected from the grime of ordinary days. The line’s intent is pastoral but also corrective. It’s not just “be nice” or “be devout”; it’s relocate the search for God’s “loving-kindness” into the public, repetitive, unglamorous places where character is actually formed.

The subtext is that “common life” is where people most doubt they are allowed to bring their spiritual hunger. Smith answers that doubt with a geography: the divine is not hidden in rarefied moments but stretched across “all the breadth” of lived experience. That word choice matters. “Breadth” suggests abundance and permission; “open-air” suggests health, clarity, and moral oxygen, a rebuke to any faith that thrives on secrecy, scruples, or spiritual elitism.

Contextually, this is a century wrestling with industrialization, urban poverty, and social fragmentation, when religion could either retreat into respectability or translate itself into daily ethics. Smith’s phrasing nudges believers toward a practical theology: look for God not only in prayer meetings, but in work, family strain, neighborliness, and civic duty. The rhetorical power is its quiet democratization of the sacred: no gated access, no special vocabulary, just the wide outdoors of the everyday.