Daily Inspiration Quote by Hugh Blair

Blair is making a power play disguised as a compliment. By crowning the Bible as the benchmark for "purity and exactness of style", he isn’t only praising scripture; he’s trying to stabilize an entire aesthetic order in an age when prose is getting freer, more commercial, and more secular. The sentence functions like a moral spine slipped into a writing manual: good style isn’t just clear, it’s clean. "Purity" does double duty here, naming both linguistic restraint and spiritual correctness, the kind of term that quietly implies its opposite - corruption, vulgarity, modern excess.

The context matters: Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres helped codify what polite, educated English should sound like in the late Enlightenment. Invoking the Bible gives that codification an authority that can’t be cross-examined. If the Bible is the standard, then stylistic debate becomes quasi-theological; disagreement risks sounding like irreverence. It also launders a particular English prose ideal - balanced, plain, declarative - through sacred prestige, even though the Bible (as English readers met it) was a translation shaped by committees, politics, and competing idioms.

There’s a subtle democratizing claim, too. The Bible is widely read; it offers a shared reference point beyond classical education in Greek and Latin. Blair’s move lets polite culture say, with a straight face, that its "exactness" is accessible to ordinary readers, while still using that standard to police taste.