Life & Mortality Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck writes with the cool urgency of someone watching a support beam crack and refusing to pretend the ceiling will hold. The line is shaped like a conditional, but it functions like a warning: if religion no longer organizes belief and behavior, the danger is not spiritual vacancy in the abstract; its a practical shortage of moral muscle. The phrase "we had better know it" is doing the heavy lifting. Buck isnt mourning faith so much as rejecting denial. Nostalgia, in her view, is an ethical hazard because it delays adaptation.

Her subtext is pointedly modern: morality cannot be outsourced to inherited institutions without constant renewal. "Other sources of moral strength" is a rebuke to the idea that ethics are naturally glued to doctrine. Its also a challenge to secular complacency. Buck anticipates the thin gruel version of post-religious life where people assume that progress, education, or good intentions will automatically generate solidarity. She wants deliberateness: if the old engine stalls, you build a new one, on purpose.

Context matters here. Buck lived through world wars, revolution, and the collision of cultures between the U.S. and China; she saw what happens when ideologies rush in to fill a vacuum. The "before it is too late" isnt apocalypse-talk; its historical memory. She is asking for moral infrastructure robust enough to survive pluralism, propaganda, and mass violence. The line works because it refuses both piety and smug atheism: it treats belief systems as tools societies depend on, and insists we measure whether the tool still works before the emergency arrives.