Art & Creativity Quote by James Paget

Paget’s line lands like a scalpel: cool, clinical phrasing used to deliver a moral indictment. “I know of no book” is the scientist’s preface to a verdict, a gesture toward evidence and comparison rather than sermonizing. He isn’t claiming omniscience; he’s claiming a surveyed field. That posture matters, because it reframes criticism of the Bible from irreverence into diagnosis.

The provocation is in the double scope: “both public and private.” Paget flags not only crusades, inquisitions, and state violence justified by scripture, but the quieter domestic cruelties that ride under the banner of righteousness: the disciplining of bodies, the policing of desire, the sanctifying of hierarchy. “Brutality and sadistic conduct” isn’t just “violence”; it implies pleasure, or at least indulgence, taken in punishment when authority feels divinely backed. The subtext is that the Bible’s cultural power can launder cruelty into virtue by giving it language, narrative, and permission.

Context sharpens the charge. Paget lived in Victorian Britain, an era saturated in biblical authority and missionary confidence, while also marked by imperial coercion and strict social discipline. As science professionalized and biblical literalism collided with new knowledge, one common defense of scripture was its supposed moral superiority. Paget flips that claim: whatever the Bible’s beauty or ethical passages, its unmatched reach has also made it an unmatched instrument. The intent isn’t to argue theology line-by-line; it’s to puncture the assumption that sacred status inoculates a text from consequences.