Daily Inspiration Quote by John Lothrop Motley

Motley’s line lands like a clap in a quiet church: not because it’s subtle, but because it pretends to be a moral maxim while smuggling in a cultural indictment. “A good lawyer” is competence defined by adversarial skill - parsing loopholes, exploiting ambiguity, turning human mess into winnable categories. “A bad Christian” is the punchline that reframes that competence as spiritual failure. The sentence works by forcing two ethical systems to collide: law’s strategic combat versus Christianity’s ideal of mercy, confession, and humility. It’s less theology than a way of naming the uneasy feeling that winning in court can look a lot like winning at sin.

Motley, a 19th-century historian steeped in Protestant moral vocabulary, is also writing in a world where law is rising as a professional class and as a tool of the modern state. In that context, the quip reads as anxiety about the lawyer’s expanding power: the person who can make language do violence without ever raising a hand. The subtext isn’t “law is evil.” It’s sharper: the lawyer’s excellence depends on suspending the very virtues Christianity publicly praises - charity, truth-telling without reservation, forgiveness over retaliation. A “good” lawyer must, at times, defend the undeserving, attack the truthful, and treat morality as irrelevant to outcome.

The cruelty of the aphorism is also its rhetorical elegance. It flatters the listener’s piety while licensing suspicion of expertise. Motley makes a social hierarchy feel like a moral one - and in a single line, turns professional skill into a kind of character evidence.