Daily Inspiration Quote by Rowland Hill

It is a line that smuggles a culture war into a joke. "Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?" isn’t theology so much as tactics: a jab at the pious reflex to treat pleasure as suspicious, and a pitch for stealing back the emotional machinery of popular music. Hill’s question form matters. He doesn’t scold; he teases, as if the answer is obviously "he shouldn’t", and only the self-defeating habits of religious communities have let it happen.

The intent is pragmatic. If the goal is persuasion, you don’t win by sounding like medicine. You win by borrowing the sugar. Hill is arguing for using catchy melodies (often associated with taverns, street songs, or secular entertainments) as vehicles for sacred lyrics. The subtext is a rebuke: when faith insists on being aesthetically austere, it hands the crowd-pleasing arts to everyone else and then complains about losing the crowd.

Context sharpens the bite. In 19th-century Britain, evangelical revivalism and mass urban culture were colliding. Tunes traveled faster than sermons; they were memetic before "meme" was a word. Hill’s quip recognizes that music isn’t decoration, it’s infrastructure: it builds community, rehearses feeling, makes ideas portable. If "the Devil" has the good tunes, he has an unfair distribution advantage.

There’s also a sly concession tucked inside the devil imagery: the world’s delights are genuinely delightful. The line grants the power of pleasure, then insists it shouldn’t be ceded. It’s not an argument for sanitizing art; it’s an argument for competing on the same emotional playing field.