Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Harris

Religion enters here not as revelation but as psychological technology: a set of rites engineered to renegotiate terror. Paul Harris frames belief as a late-stage adaptation to an older, darker mental landscape where “bad spirits” dominate the imagination. The clever move is the “even more powerful than” clause. It doesn’t deny fear; it outbids it. The comfort religion offers, in this telling, isn’t the elimination of dread but a new hierarchy of invisible forces that makes dread feel governable.

Harris’s diction is legalistic and evolutionary at once. “In course of time” reads like case law for civilization: precedent accumulates, practices stabilize, outcomes become predictable. “Rites” suggests procedure, repeatability, a kind of social contract with the cosmos. This is religion as due process for anxiety - a way to transform diffuse panic into an actionable routine. You can’t cross-examine misfortune, but you can perform something and call it agency.

The subtext is gently skeptical without being sneering. Harris grants religion real efficacy (“tempered the agony”) while keeping it provisional (“for the time being”). That phrase is the pressure point: solace is a temporary settlement, not a final verdict. Written by a lawyer living through rapid modernization and the era’s appetite for scientific explanations of culture, the line echoes early 20th-century rationalism: faith as a human instrument that organizes fear, polices uncertainty, and briefly makes the world feel less haunted.