Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Henry

Henry is doing a quiet piece of moral accounting: greatness without goodness is a flashy currency that doesn’t buy anything worth having, while goodness without greatness can remain too small to matter. The line’s power comes from its symmetry. He doesn’t pit virtue against ambition; he yokes them together, insisting each is incomplete alone. “Truly valuable” is the tell: in a world where status often passes for worth, goodness becomes the standard that appraises greatness and exposes counterfeit glory.

The subtext is practical, almost managerial. Henry isn’t romanticizing saintliness; he’s arguing for “serviceable” goodness - virtue that actually gets deployed. Greatness, in his usage, isn’t just ego or fame but capacity: influence, office, resources, authority. Those tools can widen the radius of moral action, turning private decency into public benefit. That’s a pointed message from a clergyman watching early modern England harden around hierarchy, patronage, and the growing apparatus of state and commerce. Sermons in that period routinely wrestled with a problem still familiar: the powerful can do enormous good, or enormous harm, often while calling it “greatness.”

Henry’s theological backdrop matters, too. Protestant moral teaching prized inward holiness, but it also pressed believers toward visible, useful works. So the sentence doubles as a warning and a recruitment pitch: if you have greatness, it needs goodness to be more than vanity; if you have goodness, seek the kind of greatness - education, station, competence - that lets your virtue leave the room and enter the world.