Happiness Quote by Mary Wortley Montagu

A razor in a velvet glove: Montagu opens by granting religion its practical uses, then pivots to a warning aimed less at believers than at fashionable skeptics. Calling religion a "comfort", a "cordial", and a "restraint" is deliberately utilitarian. She is not praising doctrine; she is defending religion as social technology, a system that anesthetizes pain, steadies the ill, and keeps some portion of human cruelty from spilling over. The triad moves from private suffering (distressed) to bodily vulnerability (sick) to public danger (wicked), sketching religion as a kind of informal welfare state and moral police rolled into one.

The real target is the Enlightenment parlor sport of "argu[ing] or laugh[ing]" religion out of existence. Montagu treats mockery as political action: to ridicule away a stabilizing institution without offering "some equivalent" is not brave rationalism but vandalism. That phrase smuggles in a hard-nosed demand for replacement structures - ethics, community care, meaning-making, social discipline - long before modern secular societies tried to build them.

Her sting is in the last clause: "ought to be treated as a common enemy". She frames reckless secular wit as a threat to the vulnerable, not an affront to God. It's a striking bit of rhetorical jujitsu from a writer who knew how power worked: if you remove the cultural sedatives and restraints that keep despair and violence manageable, you inherit the chaos. Montagu's subtext is sober: disbelief is allowed; irresponsibility isn't.