"No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language"
About this Quote
Ames isn’t praising piety as much as he’s drawing a border around power. In the early American republic, “eloquence” wasn’t a soft skill; it was political hardware. If you could move a room, you could move legislation, reputations, and the fragile legitimacy of a new nation. By insisting that true eloquence requires the Bible, Ames canonizes a particular linguistic training set - one that many Americans already shared - and quietly makes it the entry ticket to public authority.
The line works because it launders a cultural preference into a timeless rule. “No one ever became, or can become” is absolutist, the kind of rhetorical overreach that dares you to argue and, in doing so, forces you to treat his premise seriously. The “purity and sublimity” claim elevates the King James register (and the moral aura around it) into an aesthetic standard: plain, rhythmic, image-rich, built for memorization and recitation. Ames is pointing to the Bible as a masterclass in cadence, parallelism, and moral gravity - the very tools that make civic speech feel consequential.
The subtext is less innocent: if the Bible is the prerequisite for eloquence, then those outside Protestant biblical literacy (Catholics, Jews, deists, the nonreligious, the enslaved and less-schooled) are positioned as rhetorically second-class. In a nation negotiating what counts as “American,” Ames is saying the language of legitimacy should sound scriptural. It’s cultural nation-building disguised as advice for writers.
The line works because it launders a cultural preference into a timeless rule. “No one ever became, or can become” is absolutist, the kind of rhetorical overreach that dares you to argue and, in doing so, forces you to treat his premise seriously. The “purity and sublimity” claim elevates the King James register (and the moral aura around it) into an aesthetic standard: plain, rhythmic, image-rich, built for memorization and recitation. Ames is pointing to the Bible as a masterclass in cadence, parallelism, and moral gravity - the very tools that make civic speech feel consequential.
The subtext is less innocent: if the Bible is the prerequisite for eloquence, then those outside Protestant biblical literacy (Catholics, Jews, deists, the nonreligious, the enslaved and less-schooled) are positioned as rhetorically second-class. In a nation negotiating what counts as “American,” Ames is saying the language of legitimacy should sound scriptural. It’s cultural nation-building disguised as advice for writers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
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