The road to resolution lies by doubt:
The next way home’s the farthest way about.

Quarles frames certainty as something earned rather than assumed. “Resolution” (firm decision, settled conviction) is reached “by doubt,” suggesting that questioning, hesitation, and testing one’s motives are not obstacles but the necessary route to sound judgment. The second line extends the paradox: the “next way home” may be “the farthest way about,” implying that the most direct-seeming solution can be misleading, while the truer path requires detours—reflection, self-scrutiny, and patience. In a devotional-moral register typical of Quarles, the couplet counsels readers to distrust easy answers and accept the circuitous work of discernment as the surest way to arrive at spiritual or ethical clarity.