Daily Inspiration Quote by Hector Hugh Munro

Faith is supposed to be the hard thing; Saki flips it and makes disbelief the endangered species. The line lands like a polite drawing-room quip, but it’s a small demolition charge aimed at early 20th-century religious culture: if you want to keep Christianity believable, stop hiring its publicists.

Saki’s joke hinges on a paradox with teeth. “No one can be an unbeliever nowadays” sounds like a lament for secular modernity, until the second sentence yanks the floor away. The Christian Apologists, those earnest defenders of doctrine, have “left one nothing to disbelieve” because they’ve over-explained, over-argued, and over-managed the mystery. Apologetics becomes a kind of spiritual bureaucracy: the more it insists, the more it drains the faith of its risk and grandeur, replacing lived conviction with pamphlet logic. The subtext is less “religion is false” than “religion becomes ridiculous when it tries too hard to be reasonable.”

Context matters: Saki wrote in an England where Christianity still functioned as social default, but modern skepticism and scientific confidence were rising. Apologists were busy shoring up old certainties with new arguments. Saki’s cynicism targets that anxious respectability. By implying that apologetics makes disbelief impossible, he’s not praising conversion; he’s mocking a rhetorical culture that turns belief into a sales pitch and then wonders why it feels cheap.

The wit is surgical because it flatters both camps: believers get to laugh at the PR men; skeptics get a critique of pious spin. Either way, the real casualty is authenticity.