Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Simeon

Prayer, Simeon suggests, fails less because God is distant than because the self is noisy. The image is domestic and almost comic in its bluntness: prayers thudding against the ceiling like badly thrown coins. That metaphor does more than dramatize spiritual frustration; it relocates the problem from heaven to the room you are standing in. The ceiling is the ego, the sense that you can approach God on your own terms, with your own moral résumé.

Simeon’s intent is pastoral but also disciplinary. He’s not trying to provide a technique for better “results” in prayer; he’s prescribing a posture. The cure is “humble spirit,” manufactured through a deliberately asymmetrical comparison: “how good the Lord is” versus “how evil you all are.” The phrase “you all” is doing quiet work here. It universalizes guilt, denies any listener the escape hatch of exception, and binds the congregation into a shared abasement that makes divine mercy feel less like a perk and more like oxygen.

Context matters: Simeon, a prominent evangelical Anglican, preached in a period when “heart religion” competed with polite, self-assured Christianity. His rhetoric pushes against the tidy moralism of respectable churchgoing. Yet the line also offers release. Once pride is punctured, prayer “mount[s] on wings of faith” - a sudden lift from cramped interiority to open sky. The subtext is transactional in the best sense: humility is not self-hatred for its own sake, but the psychological clearing that makes dependence plausible, and faith emotionally credible.