Great Necessities Call Out Great Virtues

From The Hearth

July 5, 2026

Great necessities call out great virtues.

Abigail Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams (1780)

Historical Context

The line comes from a mother’s letter of counsel to a boy abroad in the middle of a war. She was not offering him comfort; she was telling him a hard and bracing truth — that hardship is not the enemy of character but the forge of it. She had watched ordinary farmers and shopkeepers become patriots and soldiers because the moment demanded it. Her point to her son was that he should not wish away difficulty, because it is precisely difficulty that summons the best a person has in them. As we mark 250 years, it is worth remembering that the founding generation did not feel exceptional to themselves — they were called out by necessity, and they answered.

Romans 5:3–4 — “…tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.” Paul traces the same chain Abigail did: hardship is not wasted; it produces virtue in stages.

James 1:2–4 — “…the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work.” The testing is not the interruption of the work — it is the work.

Thematic Reflection

We spend a great deal of energy trying to arrange lives free of necessity — smooth, comfortable, untroubled. Abigail Adams would gently tell us we have it backwards. The virtues we most admire in people — courage, patience, sacrifice, resolve — do not appear in easy seasons. They are called out, summoned by a need great enough to require them. This is not an argument for seeking out hardship, but it is a reason not to despair when hardship finds us. The difficulty you are facing may be the very thing drawing a greatness out of you that comfort never could.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear grandchildren, when I read Abigail Adams’s words, my mind goes straight to residency — one of the hardest stretches of my whole life. For weeks on end I worked eighty, ninety, sometimes a hundred hours, so exhausted that I had little left over for anything else. And yet it was in exactly that hardship that I learned the bulk of what prepared me to be a physician. Many years of practice have taught me a great deal since, but the foundation of all of it was laid in that difficult time. I have come to believe that life is not meant to be easy — that it is designed, in a way, to be hard, so that we can learn, grow stronger, and come to know more than we did before. The great necessity called the virtue out of me.

Lessons from Patients

I learned this not only in my own life but from my patients, over and over across the years. I have watched so many people take on difficult challenges — many of them ending in outcomes they never would have chosen. And yet facing those hardships changed them. It made them stronger. It made them more grateful for their families, more awake to what truly matters in life. Again and again I have seen it: the hardships we would never have asked for turn out to teach us the very lessons we most needed to learn.

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