Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones is trying to pull the rug out from under religion-as-compliance and replace it with religion-as-embodiment. The line pivots on a deliberate repetition of "supreme": not just to elevate Jesus, but to elevate "character" over every other moral instrument people typically reach for - rules, codes, and the anxious bookkeeping of virtues. He’s arguing that the highest ethical authority isn’t a list you consult; it’s a person you contemplate and, ideally, imitate.

The subtext is an implicit critique of moral legalism, including the church’s temptation to reduce faith to a behavioral spreadsheet. When Jones says we "do not add virtue to virtue", he’s poking at the common modern (and very Protestant) instinct to treat holiness like self-improvement: stack enough traits and you’ll approximate goodness. He rejects that incremental model. Instead, he proposes a gestalt: the ideal coheres in a single life. That’s rhetorically savvy because it bypasses debate over which virtues matter most and relocates the argument in narrative, relationship, and imagination.

Context matters. Jones wrote and preached in the early-to-mid 20th century, when liberal moralism, revivalist fervor, and social upheavals all tugged Christianity toward either ethical uplift or doctrinal boundary-policing. His phrasing offers a third lane: a Christ-centered personalism shaped by missionary experience and an emerging interest in psychology and lived religion. The move from "code" to "character" also functions as a cultural strategy: it makes Christianity less like an institution issuing demands and more like a compelling human prototype. It’s persuasion by portrait, not by statute.