Aging & Wisdom Quote by Frank Harris

Frank Harris lobs this like a cocktail glass in a crowded salon: the first accusation is theatrical, the second is the real knife. Blaming Christianity for “the faults of the age” was a well-worn provocation among late-Victorian and Edwardian freethinkers; it signals Harris’s comfort with scandal, his appetite for puncturing piety, and his sense that moral authority had curdled into hypocrisy. The sly pivot - “of course” - treats that critique as almost boringly self-evident to his circle. Then he swerves: “but why journalism?”

That question isn’t sincere; it’s bait. Harris’s subtext is that modern life has acquired a second clergy, one that preaches daily, with deadlines instead of scripture and sensation instead of salvation. If Christianity is accused of policing desire and installing guilt, journalism is accused of policing attention: manufacturing consensus, rewarding outrage, flattening complexity into a headline, turning public life into a morality play with heroes, villains, and a fresh scandal every morning.

The line also catches an anxious historical moment. By Harris’s lifetime, mass-circulation papers had become an industrial force, not just a genteel newsletter for elites. “Journalism” stands for the new gatekeepers of reputation - capable of elevating mediocrities, ruining lives, and selling politics as spectacle. Harris’s wit works because it frames that power as puzzling: why should ink on cheap paper rival a two-thousand-year-old religion in shaping a culture’s vices? The implied answer is chillingly modern: because it reaches you every day, and it pays.