Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones is trying to swap out an accountant’s religion for a relational one: stop stacking moral points and start measuring yourself against a person. The line turns on a quiet critique of ethics-as-spreadsheet. “Add virtue to virtue” evokes the tidy logic of self-improvement manuals and rule-based piety, where goodness is a cumulative project and failure is a deficit. Jones calls that posture inadequate not because virtue is bad, but because it makes the moral life abstract, impersonal, and easily gamed.

Putting Jesus Christ at the center makes “the ideal” concrete and unignorable. A code can be negotiated, minimized, or weaponized; a character confronts you with presence, story, and contradiction. The subtext is that Christianity, in Jones’s view, isn’t primarily about complying with a list but about being reshaped by an exemplar whose life embodies the values the code can only name. That move also reframes moral authority: it’s not “What rule applies?” but “What kind of person is being formed here?”

Context matters. Jones was a major 20th-century Methodist missionary voice, writing in an era when Western Protestantism was wrestling with both rigid moralism and the modern desire for authenticity. His phrasing anticipates the language of “personal relationship” Christianity while still sounding like a classic theological argument about discipleship: ethics flows from imitation, not mere instruction. It’s a rhetorical upgrade, too: character is harder to dismiss than commandments, because it asks for transformation, not performance.