Aging & Wisdom Quote by Adam Clarke

Clarke’s line is doing more than praising the Bible; it’s building a three-legged stool sturdy enough to hold an entire Protestant worldview. Author, end, matter: origin, purpose, content. By slotting Scripture into that neat triad, he turns a messy library of genres and centuries into a single, unified instrument with a single, unified voice. “God for their Author” isn’t devotional garnish; it’s a claim about authority that preempts competing interpreters. If God authored it, the reader’s job is submission before it’s understanding.

The phrase with the most polemical bite is “Truth without any mixture of error.” That’s not merely an affirmation of reliability; it’s a boundary marker in an age when textual criticism, Enlightenment rationalism, and denominational fragmentation were making certainty feel negotiable. Clarke, a Methodist theologian writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is speaking into a culture where educated skepticism was no longer fringe and where revival Christianity needed an anchor that wasn’t charisma or tradition. Calling an “eminent scholar” as witness lends the sentence a second authority, the academic seal atop the divine one.

“Salvation of mankind for their end” frames Scripture as teleological: not a neutral archive of religious ideas, but a targeted intervention. The subtext is pastoral and strategic. If the Bible’s purpose is salvation, then readings that treat it chiefly as literature, history, or moral philosophy miss the point and risk being morally suspect. Clarke’s formulation narrows the field of legitimate interpretation to those that keep conversion and holiness in view, turning hermeneutics into a spiritual test as much as an intellectual one.