If you can get some of the devil's money to use for the Lord's work, if you have to borrow it, it is all right... — John Harvey Kellogg

If you can get some of the devil's money to use for the Lord's work, if you have to borrow it, it is all right and carry on the work.

Author: John Harvey Kellogg

Insight: We usually think of morality in black and white terms, but this quote points at something messier that we actually live with all the time: the question of whether the source of something matters more than what you do with it. Kellogg was justifying using questionable funds for medical advancement, but the principle shows up everywhere now—from people who use inheritance money from difficult relatives to start charities, to those who feel conflicted about accepting help from people they don't fully trust. The unsettling part is that this logic can justify almost anything if you believe strongly enough in your cause. A lot of harm has been done by people absolutely certain they were doing good work with questionable means. Yet it's also true that waiting for perfectly clean resources often means never starting at all. Real change usually gets built with whatever tools are available, not ideal ones. Maybe the honest version of Kellogg's idea isn't "the ends justify the means" but something more specific: be clear-eyed about what you're accepting and from whom, do the work anyway if it matters enough, and then stay alert to how compromises can quietly shift what the work actually becomes.