Hannah More Quotes
nothing is more common than to mistake the sign for the thing itself; nor is any practice more frequent than that of endeavoring to acquire the exterior mark, without once thinking to labor after the interior grace.
More, Hannah. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. T. Cadell, 1790.
Hannah More was an English religious writer and philanthropist, remembered as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist. Born in Bristol, she taught at a school founded there by her father and began writing plays. She became involved with the London literary elite and was a leading Bluestocking member. Her later plays and poetry became more evangelical, and she joined a group campaigning against the slave trade. In the 1790s she wrote several Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious, and political topics for distribution to the literate poor (famously a riposte to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man). Meanwhile, she broadened her links with schools that she and her sister Martha had founded in rural Somerset. These modelled her strictures on the education of the poor, permitting a limited reading ability but no writing.
