Daily Inspiration Quote by John Nelson Darby

A single line that sounds like a shrug is doing the work of a schism. John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century clergyman and architect of the Plymouth Brethren movement, isn’t offering a lifestyle tip; he’s drawing a boundary with surgical calm. “Let those who like society better have it” carries the cool finality of renunciation: if the world’s approval, networks, amusements, and norms matter to you, take them. We’re going elsewhere.

The intent is separatist, but not merely anti-social. Darby’s “society” is code for a moral order he believed was spiritually compromised: respectable churches entangled with state power, bourgeois gentility masking complacency, public life organized around status and gain. The phrasing is strategic. He doesn’t thunder about sin; he grants permission. That permission is a kind of verdict, implying that choosing “society” is choosing the lesser thing, the temporal thing, the distracted thing.

Subtext: spiritual seriousness requires distance. Darby’s theology leaned hard into the idea of a faithful remnant, a community defined as much by what it refuses as what it affirms. The line therefore flatters the in-group without ever naming it. It suggests that real discipleship will look like opting out, even when opting out costs comfort, reputation, and institutional belonging.

Context sharpens the edge. In an era when modernity was accelerating - industrial wealth, urban crowds, reform politics, denominational respectability - Darby’s sentence functions like an exit sign. It’s not an argument meant to win “society”; it’s a permission slip to abandon the contest entirely.