Faith & Spirit Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne slips a blade of irony into a sugar cube. Calling prayer "the sweetest and most easy" duty sounds, on its face, like clean Anglican piety: the one obligation that asks for no money, no public risk, no real exertion beyond a bent knee and a warmed-over phrase. But Sterne is a novelist of nerves and hypocrisies, and he knows how "duty" works as a social alibi. By crowning prayer as the easiest task, he quietly indicts the way religion can become the most convenient form of virtue - an interior performance that flatters the self while leaving the harder duties (repairing harm, giving up comfort, changing conduct) safely untouched.

The line’s craft is in its double bind. If you agree, you’re confessing that the religious life can be optimized for comfort; if you disagree, you’re forced to admit how often prayer is treated as a lightweight substitute for action. "Certainly" is the tell: a confident adverb that reads like pastoral reassurance, but also like a writer winking at the reader, daring them to notice how certainty can be a rhetorical narcotic.

Context matters: in 18th-century Britain, moral sentiment and polite religiosity were public currencies. Sterne, a clergyman-novelist writing in a culture that prized decorum, often weaponized gentleness - soft phrasing that exposes hard truths. Here, prayer is framed less as spiritual struggle than as pleasurable compliance, which is precisely why the line lands: it captures how easily devotion can slide into self-soothing, and how attractive that slide can be.