Education Quote by Adam Clarke

Clarke turns monotheism into a piece of logical scaffolding: “supreme” can’t be plural. If you posit more than one infinite, all-perfect source, you haven’t expanded the divine roster; you’ve quietly emptied it. Two beings with identical, unlimited attributes would be indistinguishable, collapsing into one. Two beings with competing wills or domains would each be limited, and therefore not “supreme.” The line is less a poetic hymn than a philosophical trapdoor.

The specific intent is defensive and disciplinary. Clarke is policing the boundary of orthodox Christianity against anything that smells like polytheism, dualism, or a diluted “multiple ultimate principles” metaphysics. In the early 19th-century Protestant world he inhabited, theology was increasingly forced to argue in the language of reason: deists wanted a tidy First Cause, Unitarians questioned traditional formulations, and Enlightenment habits demanded coherence. Clarke meets that pressure head-on by treating God-talk as a matter of definitions that either hold or self-destruct.

The subtext is an anxiety about fragmentation. A universe with multiple “supreme sources” implies a cosmos with no final authority, no ultimate moral governor, no stable ground for revelation. Clarke’s insistence isn’t only about counting gods; it’s about preserving a single center of gravity for meaning and obligation. He frames monotheism not as inherited piety but as the only concept of God that can survive scrutiny: the minute you multiply the ultimate, you’ve stopped talking about ultimacy at all.