Hannah More Quotes
The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.
More, Hannah. Christian Morals. Vol. 1, T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813.
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.
