Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line lands like a genteel cough that turns out to be a laugh. “Paganism” isn’t presented as a coherent creed; it’s a social contaminant, a mood that spreads: sensuality, irreverence, the suspicion that the body and the world might matter more than the chapel’s moral bookkeeping. By calling it “infectious,” Forster borrows the language of public health and turns it against the guardians of respectability who loved to treat pleasure as pathology.

The kicker is the comparison set: diphtheria (a real, deadly Victorian terror) and piety (a supposedly wholesome virtue) are placed on the same hygienic spectrum. The joke has teeth. It implies that piety, too, is a kind of contagion - learned, transmitted, socially rewarded - and that the people who warn you about “immorality” may be less interested in your soul than in maintaining the quarantine lines of class, empire, and sexual propriety.

Forster wrote in a culture obsessed with cleanliness: clean bodies, clean morals, clean narratives about British superiority. His fiction keeps puncturing that obsession by staging encounters with the “unclean” forces that make life feel larger: desire, nature, spontaneity, the pull of the ancient and the non-English. The sentence works because it mimics the voice of a scolding society - then quietly flips it. If paganism spreads so easily, maybe it’s not a disease at all. Maybe it’s the immune system kicking in against a suffocating moral regime.