Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Le Gallienne’s line lands like a polite dagger: not an atheist broadside, but an insider’s lament sharpened into accusation. By targeting “organized Christianity,” he slices cleanly between a founder’s animating ideals and the institutions that claim custody of them. The word “probably” is doing sly work here. It’s a hedge that reads less like uncertainty than like civilized restraint, a poet’s way of making a sweeping indictment sound almost reluctant - and therefore harder to dismiss as mere provocation.

The subtext is a familiar modern scandal: how movements built on moral imagination calcify into bureaucracies built on self-preservation. “Retard” carries the period’s confidence in progress language, implying that Christianity’s original ethical velocity has been slowed not by external persecution but by internal governance - dogma, hierarchy, respectability, and the politics of belonging. The sting is that the “agency” most effective at betraying the founder’s ideals is the one most loudly appointed to defend them.

Context matters. Le Gallienne writes out of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Anglo-American literary culture, where genteel skepticism and anti-clerical critique could coexist with genuine attraction to Christ’s moral example. This isn’t a rejection of the spiritual; it’s a repudiation of institutional capture. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting narrative of outsiders as villains. It points the finger at the machinery of sanctity itself - how an organization can turn a radical ethic into a managed brand, and call that fidelity.