Marriage Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line lands like a poisoned valentine: a marriage metaphor so neat it feels almost obvious, and then suddenly devastating. By imagining Christ suing the Church for “cruelty, adultery and desertion,” he flips the traditional romance of faith. The Church isn’t the bride; it’s the negligent spouse who has traded intimacy for institution, fidelity for power, and presence for pageantry. The legalistic phrasing (“apply for a divorce”) is the knife twist. It drags sacred union into a modern courtroom, where sentiment doesn’t matter and evidence does.

The wit works because it’s double-aimed. On the surface, Butler is indicting ecclesiastical hypocrisy: cruelty committed in Christ’s name, “adultery” as the Church’s flirtation with wealth and empire, “desertion” as abandonment of the poor and the radical ethic of the Gospels. Underneath, he’s mocking how the Church often treats Christ himself: as brand icon and moral alibi, not a living, inconvenient standard. The imagined plaintiff is the figure most Christians claim to serve; the defendant is the machinery built to honor him.

Context matters. Butler writes in a Victorian world where established religion is both social glue and ideological police, increasingly challenged by science, higher biblical criticism, and moral scandals of respectability. His punchline isn’t atheistic so much as surgical: if Christianity is to mean anything, it can’t be safely outsourced to “The Church.” The joke is that Christ would have a better case against it than it has against the modern world.