Daily Inspiration Quote by Brooke Foss Westcott

Westcott rigs the moral scoreboard in a way that still feels bracing: competence is measurable by what you can do, but devotion is revealed by what you can bear. The first clause flatters the Victorian confidence in usefulness, agency, and “powers” - a word that carries both spiritual gifts and social capacity. It suggests an almost utilitarian audit of character: talent proves itself in action, in service rendered, in the visible good you can deliver to another person.

Then he flips the instrument. Suffering, usually treated as an accident or a failure of power, becomes the actual diagnostic for love. Not feelings, not declarations, not even good works. What you can suffer - loss, inconvenience, humiliation, delay, the slow grind of caregiving - is where attachment stops being a pose and turns into cost. The subtext is mildly accusatory: anyone can be generous when it showcases their strength; love starts when strength no longer wins you applause.

Context matters. Westcott, an Anglican bishop and a major New Testament scholar, lived inside a Christian tradition that centers sacrificial endurance as a moral language - not masochism for its own sake, but solidarity. The line echoes the Gospel emphasis on patience, long-suffering, and bearing one another’s burdens, while also reflecting a late-19th-century social conscience that was beginning to grapple with poverty and industrial misery.

It works because it refuses sentimentality. Westcott isn’t romanticizing pain; he’s isolating the one arena where love can’t hide behind aptitude. Powers can impress. Suffering can only be inhabited.