Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones is trying to rescue morality from the lazy habit of judging everything by outcomes. In a culture that loves to retroactively rewrite motives based on results, he draws a sharp line: good intentions can still produce real harm, but harm born of human limitation is not automatically wickedness. That distinction matters because it makes room for humility without letting people off the hook.

The engine of the quote is his realism about cognition: "because the intelligence is limited" isn’t an excuse, it’s an anthropology. People act with partial information, mixed pressures, and faulty forecasts; error is built into the human condition. Jones’ theological move is to locate sin primarily in the will rather than the spreadsheet. A mistake is about miscalculation; sin is about misdirection. By defining sin as "wrong intention", he protects the moral imagination from turning into pure consequentialism, where the only verdict is whether something "worked."

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Pastoral, because it offers relief to the scrupulous person crushed by unintended consequences. Political, because it quietly challenges institutions that confuse harm with malice, or malice with mere incompetence, depending on whose power is at stake. Jones, writing in an era scarred by war and modernization’s unintended fallout, sounds like someone watching well-meaning projects scale up and go sideways. He’s asking for a moral vocabulary that can name tragedy, accountability, and culpability without collapsing them into the same category.