Faith Quote by Mary A. Ward

Ward sketches apostasy not as a tantrum but as a moral vocation. The engine of the line is its reversal: the truly "sensitive and noble" soul is the one who leaves, not the one who stays. That framing matters in a late-Victorian and Edwardian climate where religious doubt was often treated as vanity or rot, and where the era's big pressures (biblical criticism, evolutionary science, industrial modernity) made orthodox belief feel less like shelter and more like an inherited script. Ward's intent is to dignify the break.

Notice the careful, almost novelistic staging. "Born for religion" makes faith seem like temperament, not doctrine; it suggests a person whose spiritual appetite is real, even if the menu changes. Then comes "orthodoxies of his day and moment" - not eternal truth but historically contingent consensus, something fashionable enough to be outgrown. The subtext is quietly radical: if orthodoxy is time-bound, then leaving it can be an act of fidelity to the deeper thing religion claims to serve.

The "wilderness" is the master metaphor, borrowing biblical authority to authorize modern skepticism. It's exile recast as pilgrimage: outside the church walls, "all is experiment". That word imports the prestige of science into the register of the soul, proposing that spiritual life isn't preserved by certainty but restarted by risk. Ward isn't celebrating disbelief; she's arguing that doubt can be the crucible where belief becomes chosen rather than inherited - where "spiritual life begins again" because it has to be rebuilt from the ground up.