Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t come for faith with a theologian’s scalpel; he hits it with a newspaperman’s club. “Defined briefly” signals impatience with reverence and ceremony, as if the whole edifice can be reduced to a caption. The line is engineered as a trap: once you accept his terms, faith becomes not a virtue but a cognitive malfunction. “Illogical” is the knife twist, a word chosen to strip belief of moral glamour and relocate it in the realm of error. He’s not arguing that faith is wrong so much as insisting it’s the wrong kind of thing: not knowledge, not even reasonable hope, but an exemption from reason.

The subtext is Mencken’s favorite target, American respectability: the civic habit of laundering wishful thinking into public policy and personal righteousness. “Occurrence of the improbable” does double work. It caricatures religious miracles, sure, but it also nails the everyday bargain of belief: people don’t just assent to doctrines; they invest in outcomes. Salvation, justice, providence, the arc that bends on schedule. Mencken’s cynicism is procedural: he’s mocking the human need to outsource uncertainty to a cosmic guarantee.

Context matters: writing in a period when fundamentalism and modern science were publicly colliding (Mencken famously covered the Scopes “Monkey Trial”), he frames faith as an anti-intellectual pose that enjoys social prestige. The line’s power is its compact cruelty. It doesn’t refute faith; it declassifies it, turning what believers call “trust” into what skeptics call “wishful thinking with a halo.”