"All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs"
About this Quote
Le Gallienne lands a quiet accusation by pretending to offer a neutral historical observation. The line starts with a disarming sweep - "All religions" - and then tightens into a pattern: persecution, hindsight, a curated memory of suffering. He isn't praising faith; he's diagnosing an institutional habit. The phrase "retrospective fear and trembling" is key: the terror is safely after-the-fact, a shudder performed at a comfortable distance, once the violence can be packaged as cautionary legend rather than living scandal.
The subtext is less about believers than about religious systems as memory machines. "Each religion has its own book of martyrs" points to the way communities archive pain into identity. Martyrdom becomes proof of righteousness, a moral credential that can sanctify later power. It's not just that religions have persecuted; it's that they also narrate persecution into a usable past, selecting heroes, smoothing complexities, turning victims into symbols. A "book" implies authorship, editing, canonization - the politics of whose suffering counts, and how it gets told.
Context matters: Le Gallienne is writing from a late-Victorian/early-modernist sensibility, wary of moral certainty and suspicious of institutions dressed as virtue. Coming after centuries of European confessional conflict, and edging toward an era of mass ideology, the quote reads like a warning: any creed can weaponize conviction, and any creed can later romanticize the wreckage. The sting is that martyr stories don't merely remember cruelty; they can license it, by teaching the next generation what holiness looks like under pressure.
The subtext is less about believers than about religious systems as memory machines. "Each religion has its own book of martyrs" points to the way communities archive pain into identity. Martyrdom becomes proof of righteousness, a moral credential that can sanctify later power. It's not just that religions have persecuted; it's that they also narrate persecution into a usable past, selecting heroes, smoothing complexities, turning victims into symbols. A "book" implies authorship, editing, canonization - the politics of whose suffering counts, and how it gets told.
Context matters: Le Gallienne is writing from a late-Victorian/early-modernist sensibility, wary of moral certainty and suspicious of institutions dressed as virtue. Coming after centuries of European confessional conflict, and edging toward an era of mass ideology, the quote reads like a warning: any creed can weaponize conviction, and any creed can later romanticize the wreckage. The sting is that martyr stories don't merely remember cruelty; they can license it, by teaching the next generation what holiness looks like under pressure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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