Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands like a polite insult sharpened into a blade: Christianity, in practice, isn’t merely diluted by the world; it’s redesigned to flatter it. The provocation sits in “almost every sect,” a phrasing that leaves him room for a theoretical exception while effectively indicting the whole marketplace of denominations. He’s not attacking belief as such. He’s attacking the institutional instinct to survive by mirroring the very “prejudices” it claims to challenge.

The key word is “accommodate,” which makes the corruption sound administrative, even reasonable. Hazlitt’s subtext is that the betrayal isn’t dramatic apostasy; it’s incremental compromise. Doctrine gets updated like a public-facing brand: soften the hard edges, sanctify local hierarchies, bless the nation, soothe the affluent, keep the peace. “Essence” gestures to an original moral radicalism - humility, solidarity with the lowly, an ethic that should embarrass power. A “perversion” happens when that ethic becomes a permission slip for whatever a society already wants to do.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution and amid Britain’s anxious conservatism, Hazlitt watched established churches function as moral scaffolding for class order and political reaction. As a critic shaped by dissenting traditions and Enlightenment suspicion of authority, he’s less interested in theology than in cultural mechanics: how institutions domesticate dangerous ideas.

What makes the sentence work is its compressed sociology. It doesn’t argue point-by-point; it diagnoses a recurring pattern: a faith’s public form is often the world’s self-portrait, painted in sacred colors.