Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s opening move is a trapdoor: he sounds like a garden-variety iconoclast (“I dislike him very much”), then swivels into something more surgical. The punch isn’t aimed at Christ as a moral figure so much as at the machinery built around him. That quick concession - “Still, I can stand him” - is the tell. Butler isn’t staging a simple atheist mic drop; he’s separating the putative subject (Jesus) from the institutional salesforce that markets, polices, and monetizes him.

The real venom lands on “profession.” Butler frames religious mediation not as vocation or calling but as a job category, a trade guild of interpreters whose livelihood depends on keeping the product mysterious, exclusive, and perpetually misrepresented. “Hoodwink” is vivid and bodily: religion as literal blinding. It suggests not persuasion but trickery, a con that requires the audience’s vision be managed. The subtext is classed and modern: the clerical class as a self-protecting profession that converts belief into credentialed authority.

Context matters. Butler is writing out of Victorian England’s crisis of faith, when Darwin, higher biblical criticism, and industrial modernity were corroding inherited certainties. In that climate, defending Christianity often meant defending the church as an institution; Butler pries those apart. It’s also a cunning bit of rhetorical positioning: by granting Christ a grudging tolerance, he inoculates himself against the easy rebuttal (“You just hate Jesus”) and keeps the spotlight on what he thinks is the scandal - not faith, but the people paid to package it.