Justice & Law Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t merely sneer at Sunday school; he redesigns it as carceral architecture. Calling it a “prison” yanks the scene out of stained-glass nostalgia and into the civic language of punishment, where obedience is produced, not inspired. The punch is in the inversion: the children aren’t there to be saved from their own sins, but to “do penance” on behalf of adults. Mencken frames childhood piety as a kind of moral outsourcing scheme.

The subtext is classic Mencken: religion as social control masquerading as care, virtue as a performance staged for the anxious middle class. “Evil conscience” is a provocation, because it refuses the polite premise that parents are motivated by pure concern. He implies they’re driven by fear, shame, and the need to launder their own moral uncertainty through their kids. The child becomes an offering to respectability. Attendance functions less like education and more like a weekly receipt: proof that the family is on the right side of the community’s moral border.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an America where Protestant civic culture was thick in the air and where he spent years lampooning what he saw as Puritanism’s dead hand on public life. His target isn’t private faith so much as enforced innocence: the idea that a disciplined child can redeem an undisciplined society. The line works because it’s cruelly efficient. It turns a familiar institution inside out and leaves you wondering who, exactly, is being “reformed.”