As human things are never at a stand, so a church or nation, in a quiet and peaceable state, is always growing insensibly worse, till it become either so corrupt as to deserve and procure exterminating judgments, or, in the infinite mercy of God, by some great shock or revolution, is brought back to simplicity and purity, and reduced as it were to its first principles.
— Witherspoon
The point
A church at rest quietly decays until judgment or revival restores it to its first principles.
