Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Bigotry doesn’t just distort faith in Colton’s line; it commits a clean, rhetorical homicide, then stages the corpse. The verb “murders” is doing the heavy lifting: religion isn’t merely “corrupted” or “misused” but killed outright, implying intent, violence, and an aftermath that needs covering up. What follows is the con: bigotry animates “her ghost,” a haunting counterfeit of religion’s moral authority, and deploys it as a prop to “frighten fools.” The sentence is less a pious defense of religion than an indictment of how power works when it borrows sacred language.

The gendered “her” matters. Religion is cast as a feminized figure whose image can be exploited: revered, protected, and ventriloquized. Bigotry becomes the puppeteer, keeping religion “present” only as spectacle and intimidation. That choice lets Colton skewer two targets at once: the zealot who weaponizes belief and the credulous public that mistakes the performance for the real thing. “Fools” isn’t casual insult; it’s a diagnosis. The victims aren’t just the oppressed, but the easily led, those trained to fear rather than think.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in an England still vibrating from the upheavals of the French Revolution and the long Napoleonic aftermath, Colton is speaking into an era when Protestant-Catholic suspicion, political loyalty, and national identity routinely masqueraded as religious certainty. The intent isn’t to abolish faith; it’s to expose how sectarian animus survives by wearing religion like a mask, then calling the mask holy.