Faith & Spirit Quote by Graham Greene

Greene doesn’t mourn lost belief; he interrogates the instinct that rushes in to replace it. The line is shaped like a warning but works like a trap: it seems to counsel moderation ("don’t abandon all faith") and then quietly undermines the comfort of substitution. That last question - "Or is it the same faith under another mask?" - turns the reader from a victim of disillusionment into a suspect with a motive.

The intent is less theological than psychological. Greene is diagnosing the human need for a narrative that makes suffering legible and choices feel justified. When one creed collapses - religious, political, romantic, professional - we rarely become pure skeptics. We convert. We swap liturgies: God for ideology, doctrine for "common sense", church for nation, nation for the self. His phrasing insists that faith is not just content ("what you believe") but a structure of dependence ("how you need to believe").

The subtext is classic Greene: guilt, suspicion of purity, and a wary compassion for weakness. The sentence offers an "alternative" and immediately questions whether alternatives are real or just cosmetic rebrandings of the same hunger for certainty. It lands because it captures a modern contradiction: we pride ourselves on being post-faith, then build new temples out of psychology, consumer identity, or moral absolutism. Greene’s mask metaphor is the real blade. It suggests that belief is a costume the mind keeps tailoring, not a single outfit you can simply outgrow.