Faith & Spirit Quote by P. G. Wodehouse

Golf, in Wodehouse's hands, becomes a confessional with better tailoring. The joke is that a sport notorious for petty rule-bending and genteel self-mythology is promoted as an "infallible test" of character, as if the rough were Sinai and the scorecard a covenant. Wodehouse is poking at the Edwardian-era hunger for simple moral yardsticks - especially among the classes that had the leisure to invent them. If you want to know whether a man can be trusted with money, love, or the empire, watch whether he improves his lie when nobody's looking.

The line works because it flatters and skewers at once. It flatters golfers (and, by extension, the clubby world that reads Wodehouse) by granting them a high-stakes ethical drama: temptation, surveillance, redemption. Then it quietly undercuts that grandeur by anchoring integrity to something so absurdly minor - a ball nestled in grass. The phrase "only God is watching" is the sharpest blade: a grand theological witness deployed to police a tiny act of dishonesty. It's moral seriousness as social performance, even when the audience is imaginary.

Context matters: Wodehouse wrote amid a culture that treated sport as character-training for gentlemen, a substitute catechism for an elite anxious about merit and trust. His intent isn't to preach; it's to reveal how virtue gets outsourced to rituals. The real target is the comforting fantasy that goodness can be measured cleanly - preferably on a well-manicured course.