Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Butler

A line like this doesn’t just pick a fight with heaven; it relocates moral authority from the clouds to the street. Butler’s provocation hinges on a clean reversal of the old script: instead of humans as unreliable narrators and gods as guarantors, he makes integrity a human achievement and divinity a suspect institution. The punch comes from its blunt antithesis - “every man” versus “every god” - a democratic sweep on one side, a totalizing indictment on the other. It’s heresy phrased like a civic slogan.

Butler wrote in a Victorian culture where religion still underwrote social order, even as Darwin and higher biblical criticism were eroding its intellectual monopoly. His work often needles piety not to be edgy, but to expose how “God” can become a ventriloquist for power: church, empire, respectable hypocrisy. Calling gods “liars” isn’t primarily metaphysical; it’s rhetorical. He’s naming the way divine language gets used to sanctify convenient fictions - suffering as deserved, hierarchy as natural, obedience as virtue.

The subtext is bracingly modern: if you want truth, don’t outsource it to transcendence. “Let” matters, too. It’s an imperative dressed as permission, implying that truthfulness is a discipline we can choose, while the divine is a story we can refuse. In Butler’s hands, skepticism isn’t nihilism; it’s an ethics of personal responsibility, stripped of cosmic alibis.