"He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it"
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A good Saki line doesn’t argue; it skewers. Here, the target is a particular clerical contortion: the preacher who keeps Christianity aloft not by defending its truth, but by praising its usefulness. The “pulpit” matters because it’s supposed to be a platform for revelation, not PR. Saki turns it into a sales counter where the product’s finest feature is that it’s fabricated.
The barb lands on a paradox that shows up whenever institutions feel their credibility thinning: if you can’t claim “it happened,” pivot to “it helps.” The phrase “glory of Christianity” is bait, inviting reverence, then snapping shut with “though it is not true.” That reversal is classic Munro: social propriety punctured by the impolite sentence everyone is trained not to say. “Found necessary to invent it” adds a bureaucratic chill. It frames faith less as mystery than as a committee solution, a human technology designed to manage behavior, fear, and social order.
Subtextually, Saki isn’t just calling a religion false; he’s indicting the moral vanity of the apologist who believes he’s being sophisticated. The preacher congratulates himself for realism while still demanding obedience to an admitted fiction. Context helps: Munro wrote in an Edwardian Britain where skepticism, scientific modernity, and genteel hypocrisy coexisted in the same drawing rooms. The line reads like a needle slipped under the skin of respectable society: you don’t need to disprove the sermon if the sermon has already surrendered, then tried to pass the surrender off as virtue.
The barb lands on a paradox that shows up whenever institutions feel their credibility thinning: if you can’t claim “it happened,” pivot to “it helps.” The phrase “glory of Christianity” is bait, inviting reverence, then snapping shut with “though it is not true.” That reversal is classic Munro: social propriety punctured by the impolite sentence everyone is trained not to say. “Found necessary to invent it” adds a bureaucratic chill. It frames faith less as mystery than as a committee solution, a human technology designed to manage behavior, fear, and social order.
Subtextually, Saki isn’t just calling a religion false; he’s indicting the moral vanity of the apologist who believes he’s being sophisticated. The preacher congratulates himself for realism while still demanding obedience to an admitted fiction. Context helps: Munro wrote in an Edwardian Britain where skepticism, scientific modernity, and genteel hypocrisy coexisted in the same drawing rooms. The line reads like a needle slipped under the skin of respectable society: you don’t need to disprove the sermon if the sermon has already surrendered, then tried to pass the surrender off as virtue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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