Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Devotion can be a costume, and Fuller wants you to notice how well it fits the wrong body. "With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself" is a warning from inside the church, not a cheap jab from the outside: the real threat is not open wickedness but sanctified performance. The verb "sugar o'er" does the heavy lifting. It evokes the period's taste for masking bitter medicines with sweetness, suggesting piety as glaze: attractive, palatable, and fundamentally superficial. The devil does not need to change; he only needs better branding.

Fuller, a seventeenth-century English clergyman writing in a culture anxious about hypocrisy, sectarian zeal, and moral reputation, aims at a familiar religious pathology: the translation of faith into visible signals. "Visage" is face, optics, surface. "Action" is behavior, the public record. Put them together and you get a moral theater where appearances can be weaponized. The line implies that outward devotion is not merely insufficient; it can become an active solvent that dissolves discernment, allowing evil to circulate under the seal of righteousness.

Subtextually, Fuller is policing his own side. Post-Reformation England had elevated "true religion" into a national argument, and "pious action" could double as social leverage, political camouflage, even a license to persecute. His cynicism is pastoral: if the devil can be sugared over, then the faithful must cultivate suspicion toward easy virtue, including their own. The quote works because it refuses comfort. It suggests that holiness is not proven by how it looks, but by what it cannot be made to excuse.