Daily Inspiration Quote by Adam Clarke

Genius, Clarke insists, is mostly a comforting superstition. His target is the romantic habit of treating “inimitable excellencies” as mysterious endowments that excuse everyone else from trying. The sentence is built like a pastoral corrective: look closely, from “infancy to manhood,” and the aura evaporates into “line” and “means” - choices, habits, discipline, formation. It’s a demystification of greatness that also carries a moral edge: if excellence is a consequence, then character is accountable.

The phrasing “let us watch them” is doing quiet work. Clarke is inviting surveillance not for gossip but for instruction, a method familiar to a theologian in an age when biography doubled as moral pedagogy. Early 19th-century Protestant culture prized “progress” as both spiritual and practical: sanctification on the one hand, self-cultivation on the other. Clarke yokes the two. Achievement becomes legible as a sequence of causes, not a miracle.

There’s subtextual pushback against elitism, too. If exceptional people are made rather than minted, their “excellencies” are, at least in part, reproducible - and thus socially useful. Yet Clarke doesn’t quite democratize genius; he relocates it. The “necessary consequence” language is almost sternly deterministic, implying that outcomes track methods with moral regularity. It flatters effort, but it also warns: follow a crooked line, use poor means, and your “progress” will testify against you.