Daily Inspiration Quote by Simon Greenleaf

Greenleaf is doing something more subversive than piety: he is smuggling a psychology of power into a moral observation. A judge by trade, he frames worship less as a private feeling than as a public metric. Whatever you treat as ultimate - God, nation, reason, wealth, even “virtue” - becomes the ruler you measure yourself and others against. That’s the intent: to warn that devotion is never neutral. It manufactures ideals, and ideals quietly harden into verdicts.

The line “whatever it be” is the tell. Greenleaf isn’t only defending Christian worship; he’s acknowledging substitution. People will always enthrone something. The subtext is that the idol doesn’t just sit there; it starts recruiting. You “clothe” it with attributes you already want to admire, which means worship is partly projection: you build a portrait of perfection out of your own moral vocabulary, then call it transcendent. That move legitimizes your preferences, gives them a sacred sheen, and makes dissent feel like heresy rather than disagreement.

Context matters: Greenleaf lived in an America thick with Protestant moral seriousness and rising confidence in institutions. As a legal mind, he understands that standards define outcomes. Change the standard of perfection and you change the person you’re trying to become - and the society you’re willing to justify. The sentence lands because it reads like a calm description, but it’s really a diagnosis: your god is your blueprint, and you will try to live (and judge) accordingly.