Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor’s line has the clean click of a recipe: virtue isn’t just a halo, it’s an ingredient. Not a guarantee, not a vending machine - but something that, accumulated and combined, tends to produce “reward.” That metaphor matters. It reframes morality from a single heroic gesture into a daily practice, measured in additions rather than declarations. In a 17th-century Christian world saturated with anxiety about salvation, that’s both reassurance and discipline: keep adding, keep mixing, keep living as if the final outcome is being quietly prepared.

Taylor was an Anglican cleric writing through civil war, regicide, and the churn of competing theologies. In that atmosphere, “virtue” wasn’t an abstract self-help keyword; it was a social adhesive and a political signal. The subtext is a defense of steady ethical conduct against extremes - zealotry, opportunism, or the kind of performative piety that spikes during crisis. By calling virtue an “ingredient,” he sidesteps crude transactional faith (“do good, get paid”) while still insisting the moral universe has direction and memory.

The phrase “unto reward” carries the theological tension of his era: reward can mean divine grace, inner peace, social trust, or eternity itself. Taylor leaves it strategically open, allowing the line to comfort the devout without alienating the practically minded. The intent isn’t to flatter the virtuous; it’s to motivate the wavering. Virtue, he implies, is rarely rewarded in the moment, but it is never wasted. It goes into the pot.