Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

“A Christian is the highest style of man” lands with the polished certainty of an 18th-century tagline: moral hierarchy rendered as aesthetic judgment. Young, a poet who wrote in the shadow of Anglican orthodoxy and a culture obsessed with “taste,” makes faith sound less like dogma than like refinement. “Style” is the tell. He isn’t only claiming Christianity is true; he’s claiming it is the most elevated form of human being, the final upgrade in the era’s social grammar.

The line works because it fuses two status systems that were already intertwined. In Young’s England, religion wasn’t merely private belief; it was a public marker of legitimacy, discipline, and belonging. By calling Christianity a “style,” Young smuggles theology into the language of manners and rank. It flatters the reader’s self-conception: to be Christian is not simply to assent, but to become a superior specimen, a higher “type.” That’s both invitation and pressure. If the “highest style” is available, then lesser styles become moral failures, not just different lives.

Subtextually, it’s also defensive. The early Enlightenment was pushing reason, skepticism, and worldly ambition; Young’s move is to reclaim cultural prestige for piety. He reframes holiness as the ultimate sophistication, turning religion into a kind of noble fashion that claims permanence. The elegance of the phrase is the strategy: it makes supremacy sound like good taste.