Happiness Quote by Adam Clarke

Clarke isn’t trying to win an argument with archaeology or miracles; he’s offering a practical test for revelation: does this book make better people? The line is engineered to sound like common sense, almost Enlightenment-friendly. “Proved” is a bold legal word, but the evidence he submits is moral outcome: the “reasonableness and holiness” of the Bible’s precepts. In other words, Christianity can meet modernity on its own turf - rationality, ethics, social utility - without conceding the claim that it comes from God.

That move has a clear intent in Clarke’s era. As a Methodist theologian working in the wake of the Enlightenment, he’s speaking to a culture increasingly suspicious of inherited authority. Rather than insist you obey because the Church says so, he argues you can see divine authorship in the ethical design: commands that cultivate wisdom, holiness, happiness, and mutual usefulness. The phrasing quietly reframes salvation as a kind of moral technology.

The subtext is also defensive. “Reasonableness” answers deists and skeptics who branded scripture as superstition; “holiness” answers critics who feared religion was merely a social control system. By stacking “commands, exhortations, and promises,” Clarke covers the full emotional range of religious life: discipline, encouragement, reward. It’s a rhetorical triad that makes the Bible look internally coherent and psychologically comprehensive.

There’s a political note, too: “useful to one another” treats social cohesion as a theological dividend. Revelation, for Clarke, isn’t only about the next world; it’s validated in the observable improvements it supposedly produces in this one.