Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Inge

Inge doesn’t romanticize faith as a warm blanket; he frames it as a wager with real stakes. “Risk” and “venture” drag belief out of the church pew and into the marketplace, where choices cost you something and certainty is a luxury you never get to buy. The line also performs a quiet rescue of faith from the accusation of mere irrationality. If faith is a venture, it belongs to the same human toolkit as entrepreneurship, love, or any serious commitment: the decision to move without full proof.

The subtext is even sharper. Inge isn’t primarily arguing that God is demonstrable; he’s arguing that the engine of belief is internal. We’re “impelled” not by airtight logic but by “affinity and attraction” we “feel in ourselves.” That’s a psychologically candid move, and it’s also a defensive one. Faith is justified here as an honest response to desire, longing, recognition - the pull of meaning - rather than as submission to external authority. It anticipates modern accounts of belief as formed by temperament, experience, and moral imagination, not just syllogisms.

Context matters: Inge lived through the late Victorian crisis of faith, when Darwin, higher biblical criticism, and industrial modernity bruised traditional certainties. Calling faith a risk acknowledges that the old guarantees are gone. Yet he refuses the posture of embarrassment. He recasts belief as courageous agency: not clinging to certainty, but choosing a direction because something in us resonates with it. That’s the rhetoric of a philosopher who knows skepticism won’t be beaten - only outlived by commitment.