Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Landor goes for the soft underbelly of piety: not faith as comfort, but faith as ego steroid. The target isn’t the devout in general; it’s the person who discovers in “what he calls religion” a shortcut to intellectual supremacy. That sly qualifier does real work. Landor isn’t denying religion’s existence so much as pointing to the way the label can be weaponized - a self-issued badge of authority that cancels the need for argument, evidence, or humility.

The sentence is engineered like a trap. He starts with “Even the weakest disputant,” lowering expectations to the basement, then shows how religion can inflate that basement into a throne. “Conceited” is the hinge: the problem isn’t conviction, it’s the social and psychological permission structure conviction can create. Once you believe your position is backed by the divine, disagreement doesn’t feel like a debate; it feels like rebellion against truth itself. That’s why the conceit is so potent: it isn’t merely personal vanity, it’s metaphysical confidence.

Context matters. Landor writes in post-Enlightenment Britain, when public life was thick with religious controversy and moral gatekeeping even as skepticism and reformist politics surged. His line is a secular diagnosis of a familiar civic failure: arguments stop being about persuasion and become loyalty tests. The real sting is comparative - the “wisest” can be dismissed without being heard, because the conceited disputant has replaced thought with membership.