Faith & Spirit Quote by John Biddle

A man walking toward punishment tries to seize the only thing his jailers can’t confiscate: the meaning of his suffering. John Biddle’s line is a piece of devotional defiance, built to sound like surrender. He “refers” his fate to God’s “disposal,” a word that doubles as piety and quiet provocation. If the state claims the power to dispose of bodies, Biddle insists that the final jurisdiction belongs elsewhere.

The sentence is engineered as a moral hierarchy. “Glory” sits at the top; “liberty” is demoted; “life” comes last. That ordering matters in 17th-century England, where religious conformity was policed and heterodoxy could mean prison, exile, or worse. Biddle, remembered as a pioneering English anti-Trinitarian, isn’t merely bracing himself. He’s arguing, in the only register available to a dissenter, that conscience outranks civic permission. By naming liberty and life explicitly, he makes the stakes legible to readers who might not share his theology but understand coercion.

The subtext is also a rebuke to the comfortable. “In the pursuance of this work” frames his controversial ministry as labor, not rebellion; a vocation, not a stunt. He dares authorities to prove that their power is stronger than conviction, while offering fellow believers a template for martyr-adjacent courage that stops short of melodrama. It’s a clergyman’s version of civil disobedience: respectful on the surface, radically ungovernable underneath.