Time & Perspective Quote by Owen Feltham

Moral passion is easy to admire until it starts taking on water. Owen Feltham’s line warns that zeal, untethered from humanity, doesn’t just risk going too far; it becomes directionless power, capable of wrecking itself and everyone nearby. The ship image matters because it rejects the comforting idea that intensity naturally finds its “right” destination. Without a rudder, a vessel may surge forward with impressive force, but force is not judgment. It’s momentum. And momentum, Feltham implies, is what turns conviction into catastrophe.

The intent is practical, not pious: he’s trying to discipline the reader’s appetite for righteousness. “Zeal” carries a flattering charge - energy, commitment, purpose - while “humanity” sounds soft, even optional. Feltham flips that hierarchy. Humanity isn’t decoration on top of belief; it’s the steering mechanism that keeps belief from devolving into cruelty, fanaticism, or self-sabotage.

The subtext is a critique of puritanical temperament: reformers, crusaders, and moral busybodies who confuse heat with light. A zealot can be sincerely convinced and still be dangerously incompetent at reading people, consequences, and limits. “Liable to be stranded at any moment” is the quiet kicker: the failure isn’t always dramatic tyranny; it can be a sudden grounding - a movement collapsing under its own hardness, a relationship shattered by “principle,” a cause discredited by its lack of mercy.

Feltham, writing in a 17th-century England scarred by religious and political extremism, is translating recent history into a portable rule: passion needs compassion not to be nicer, but to stay navigable.