Daily Inspiration Quote by John Strachan

Peter shows up first because hierarchy loves a prooftext. Strachan’s line isn’t devotional trivia; it’s an argument dressed as observation. By pointing to the Gospel roll calls where Peter’s name leads, he smuggles in a claim about leadership: not just that Peter was prominent, but that primacy is embedded in Scripture’s very grammar. For a clergyman, that matters because “who comes first” quietly becomes “who gets to decide.”

The intent lands in Strachan’s 19th-century ecclesiastical weather. As the first Anglican bishop of Toronto, he spent his career defending institutional authority in a colonial society where Catholics, dissenting Protestants, and reform politics all challenged the old Anglican settlement. Naming Peter at the head can work two ways at once. It reinforces the apostolic model of ordered church governance (useful for Anglican episcopacy), and it gestures toward the larger Christian fight over Petrine primacy (useful to rebut or at least contain Roman Catholic claims about the pope). Either way, the subtext is: legitimate religion has a chain of command, and that chain can be traced.

What makes the line rhetorically efficient is how it borrows the Bible’s neutral-seeming list format to naturalize power. Enumerations feel like reporting, not persuading. Strachan exploits that. He invites readers to accept authority as a feature of the text itself, not a contested human arrangement. In a period when modern notions of equality were leaking into church and state, this is a small, sharp attempt to keep first place looking like fate.