Daily Inspiration Quote by Archibald Alexander

Alexander’s line is a quiet demolition of “good behavior” as a moral alibi. If you grew up around Protestant moral culture, you recognize the target: the person who looks righteous, does the correct things, and still manages to be spiritually hollow. By insisting that men are “more accountable for their motives” than “anything else,” he shifts the moral spotlight from outcomes and optics to the engine room of the self - the wants, loyalties, resentments, and secret bargains that produce action.

The phrase “primarily, morality consists in the motives” is doing theological work. Alexander, a clergyman shaped by early American Presbyterianism, is writing inside a tradition that distrusts mere external conformity. It’s not enough to avoid vice; you have to love the right things. That’s what “affections” signals: not fleeting feelings, but the settled orientation of the heart. In this view, morality isn’t a checklist; it’s a reordered interior life.

The subtext is both pastoral and disciplinary. Pastoral, because it recognizes how easily people can perform virtue while nursing envy or pride. Disciplinary, because motive-talk collapses the usual escape routes. You can’t hide behind “I did the right thing” if you did it to dominate, to impress, to punish, or to purchase status. Alexander is also implicitly skeptical of moral accounting that relies on human courts or social praise; only God can truly weigh motives, which makes inner life the real battleground.

It’s a demanding ethic, and a psychologically shrewd one: it anticipates our modern suspicion that the most dangerous corruption is the kind that dresses up as principle.