Science & Tech Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line lands like a courtroom joke delivered with a straight face: “mathematics” is permissible, but “physics or chemistry” remains taboo. The comedy is engineered through category error. He’s not really talking about numbers versus molecules; he’s mocking a moral system that tries to keep up appearances while quietly adjusting to modern life. If you can dodge pregnancy by tracking cycles and counting days, that’s framed as “natural” and therefore licit. If you do it with a condom or a pill - tangible tools, visible interventions - it becomes a sin. Mencken turns that distinction into a punchline by translating theology into the language of school subjects, making the rule sound as arbitrary as banning beakers but allowing calculators.

The subtext is classic Mencken: contempt for institutional logic that claims timeless authority yet survives by hair-splitting. “Quite lawful” carries a second sting. He’s comparing church teaching to statutory law, implying a bureaucratic apparatus of permission rather than a coherent moral vision. “Resort” suggests desperation and workaround, not virtue.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an America where Catholic doctrine on contraception collided with urbanization, women’s changing roles, and early 20th-century fights over birth control (think Comstock-era prudery giving way, unevenly, to modern sexual politics). His target isn’t merely Catholicism but any culture of respectable hypocrisy: the elite skill of finding a loophole, then calling it morality.