Art & Creativity Quote by Oswald Chambers

Chambers is smuggling a moral hierarchy into a sentence that looks like a calm bit of taxonomy. By stacking three definitions of "good" side by side, he turns a single adjective into a battleground of motives: commerce, collecting, and conscience. The bite is in the phrasing. "In the language of the book-sellers" doesn’t just describe a trade; it suggests a dialect, a way of speaking that quietly rewires value into revenue. "Salable" is blunt, almost ugly, and that ugliness is the point: the market’s criteria feel mechanically indifferent to truth.

Then he swivels to "the curious", and the critique sharpens. A "scarce" book flatters the owner more than it forms the mind; it’s knowledge as status symbol, the early-20th-century version of cultural capital. Chambers treats rarity as a distraction dressed up as refinement, a collector’s thrill mistaken for intellectual seriousness.

The final clause lands like a correction from the pulpit: "men of sense" judge a book by what it does to you. "Useful and instructive" isn’t anti-art; it’s a demand that reading cash out in changed understanding, maybe even changed character. As a theologian writing in a period when mass publishing and popular religious literature were booming, Chambers is policing the difference between consumption and formation. The subtext is Protestant and practical: truth is not what sells, nor what’s hard to get, but what disciplines the reader toward wisdom. It’s a critique of both capitalism and snobbery, delivered with the quiet confidence of someone who thinks the soul has better metrics than the marketplace.