"Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it"
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Butler’s line is a neat paradox dressed up as common sense: faith is practically useless, except that it’s indispensable. The sting is in the hyphen pause after "Faith" - a little stage direction that turns the word into a suspect on the stand. He’s not romanticizing belief; he’s interrogating it, stripping it of miracles and insisting on its mundane utility. Faith, in his framing, isn’t a superpower. It’s starter fuel.
The intent feels less like sermon than corrective. In an era when Victorian Britain was publicly pious and privately rattled by Darwin, industrial modernity, and biblical criticism, Butler often treated religious certainty as a social performance. So he retools "faith" into something broader and almost psychological: the minimum inner permission slip required to act at all. You can’t build a bridge, publish a poem, love someone, or oppose a system without first betting on an unseen outcome - that effort will matter, that the future exists in a usable form.
The subtext is faintly cynical: faith doesn’t guarantee results, and it can be embarrassingly non-technical compared to real work. "You can do very little with it" needles the idea that belief alone achieves anything. But the second clause flips the knife: without that initial leap, you don’t even start. Butler makes faith sound less like theology and more like the prerequisite delusion behind every human project: the insistence that action is not pointless.
The intent feels less like sermon than corrective. In an era when Victorian Britain was publicly pious and privately rattled by Darwin, industrial modernity, and biblical criticism, Butler often treated religious certainty as a social performance. So he retools "faith" into something broader and almost psychological: the minimum inner permission slip required to act at all. You can’t build a bridge, publish a poem, love someone, or oppose a system without first betting on an unseen outcome - that effort will matter, that the future exists in a usable form.
The subtext is faintly cynical: faith doesn’t guarantee results, and it can be embarrassingly non-technical compared to real work. "You can do very little with it" needles the idea that belief alone achieves anything. But the second clause flips the knife: without that initial leap, you don’t even start. Butler makes faith sound less like theology and more like the prerequisite delusion behind every human project: the insistence that action is not pointless.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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