Wit & Attitude Quote by Frederic William Farrar

Self-mockery is usually sold as humility; Farrar makes it a weapon. The line snaps with a comic cruelty - calling someone an idiot, then discovering the closest target is the mirror. It works because it refuses the soothing version of moral seriousness that Victorian religious culture often trafficked in. A theologian confessing idiocy isn’t just being cute. He’s puncturing the clerical temptation to stand above the flock, dispensing wisdom from a safe height.

The intent is disciplinary as much as playful: if you can catch yourself in foolishness, you’re less likely to sermonize from it. The first clause sets up a familiar social pleasure - laughing at other people’s stupidity - then yanks the reader into complicity. Farrar doesn’t condemn mockery outright; he redirects it inward, where it becomes a check on pride. That shift is the subtext: the real danger isn’t that idiots exist, it’s that the smartest person in the room is often the one most skilled at justifying his own nonsense.

Context matters. Farrar wrote in a period when religious authority was under pressure from modern criticism, science, and political reform. For a public Christian intellectual, admitting fallibility could function as credibility: a preemptive strike against accusations of hypocrisy or smug certainty. The laugh is doing double duty - spiritual practice and social strategy. It signals: I know my mind’s capacity for error; I’m not exempt from the human comedy I’m interpreting.

There’s also a quietly radical invitation here. If holiness begins with self-suspicion, then moral clarity isn’t a pose; it’s a habit of self-interrogation, sharp enough to draw blood, light enough to keep going.