Time & Perspective Quote by Sydney Carter

Carter cuts faith loose from nostalgia and pins it to a deadline. The past can “encourage” belief, he grants, but notice the double hedge: not only “what has happened,” but “what is thought to have happened.” Memory is unreliable; history is a curated story; tradition is often a consensus hallucination. By planting that doubt inside the first clause, he refuses to let faith borrow too much authority from inherited narratives, miracles-by-retelling, or the warm glow of “we’ve always believed this.”

Then he delivers the turn that gives the line its bite: “the only proof of it is in the future.” Faith, in this framing, isn’t a museum label attached to old events; it’s a wager that must cash out later. Proof doesn’t arrive as documentation but as consequence: what faith produces in the choices you make, the risks you accept, the kind of person or community you become. Carter’s poet’s logic is practical and slightly stern. If your faith never changes your tomorrow, it’s closer to sentiment, identity, or loyalty than faith.

Context matters: Carter, a British poet and folk musician, wrote in a postwar England where institutional religion was losing cultural monopoly, and where “belief” could look like mere habit. His line rehabilitates faith for skeptical times by relocating its test from ancient claims to lived outcomes. It also quietly indicts empty piety: the future is where faith is audited, not applauded.