Fatherhood Quote by Charles Lamb

Lamb lands the joke with the prim civility of a parent making a solemn vow - then flips it into a quiet indictment of paternal certainty. "Determined" announces Victorian-era authority: the father as the household's doctrinal North Star. The punchline, "if they can find out what it is", punctures that authority by revealing the supposed anchor of family identity as a fog.

The intent is not simply to sneer at religion; it's to needle the social performance of it. Lamb, an essayist steeped in the manners and hypocrisies of polite life, targets the kind of inherited faith that functions less as conviction than as a badge, a family crest worn to dinner. The father "has a religion" the way he has a surname: assumed, asserted, rarely examined. The children, cast as little detectives, become the agents of exposure. If the adults can't articulate belief, the next generation can't inherit it except as empty ritual.

Subtext-wise, the line also sketches a shifting cultural moment. Early nineteenth-century Britain had Anglican establishment on one side and a growing marketplace of dissenting sects, skepticism, and private eclecticism on the other. Lamb's wit registers that instability: tradition still demands obedience, but belief has become increasingly individualized, even improvised.

What makes it work is the genteel understatement. He doesn't shout "hypocrisy"; he lets the conditional clause do the work, turning a father's moral confidence into an inadvertent confession of confusion.