Faith & Spirit Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Prayer gets demoted here from wishful thinking to a contract with teeth. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican cleric writing in the wreckage of England's civil wars, aims this line at a perennial temptation: using piety as an alibi. "Whatsoever we beg of God" names the familiar posture of dependence; "let us also work for it" snaps in like a corrective, insisting that petition without labor is spiritual theater.

The intent is pastoral but also disciplinary. Taylor is not rejecting divine providence; he is policing the boundary between faith and laziness. In an age when catastrophe could be read as judgment and survival depended on practical competence, the quote functions as moral triage. It tells the believer: if you want peace, practice reconciliation; if you want mercy, do mercy; if you want deliverance, take the steps deliverance requires. Prayer becomes the beginning of agency, not its substitute.

Subtextually, Taylor is protecting religion from becoming a vending machine: insert supplication, receive outcomes. The syntax matters: "also" turns work into a companion act, not a rival to grace. He offers a theology that flatters neither human self-sufficiency nor passive fatalism. It is accountability dressed as devotion, a way of keeping religious language tethered to the world it claims to redeem. In a modern register, it's a warning against "manifesting" as spirituality: ask big, then earn the right to ask by moving your feet.