Daily Inspiration Quote by John Strachan

Strachan’s line is mission rhetoric with an imperial spine: a bishop is “appointed” to “diffuse the light” across “His Majesty’s dominions,” and the land is staged as a darkness that needs official illumination. The phrasing does two jobs at once. It sanctifies expansion by treating colonization as pastoral care, and it diminishes whatever already existed - Indigenous nations, their governance, their spiritual systems - by casting the region as “even a greater spiritual, than a natural wilderness.”

That comparative move is the tell. Calling a place a “natural wilderness” is already a settler trope, flattening complex inhabited landscapes into raw material. Strachan escalates it: the real problem isn’t geography but souls. “Spiritual wilderness” turns cultural difference into moral absence, making conversion sound like rescue rather than replacement. The Gospel becomes both metaphor and method: “light” suggests clarity and benevolence, while “diffuse” implies a gradual, inevitable spread, like sunrise, not policy.

Context sharpens the intent. Strachan, an Anglican cleric in early-19th-century British North America (Upper Canada), was a key architect of the colony’s Church-and-state establishment. He’s not merely eulogizing a “late Bishop”; he’s defending a program: Anglican authority as civic infrastructure. By binding Christianity to the Crown’s territorial vocabulary, he turns religious leadership into a credential for rule - and turns the colony’s contested realities into a simple story of darkness giving way to sanctioned light.