Faith & Spirit Quote by Terence

Belief in “good design,” Terence suggests, is less a technical position than a temperament: a choice to assume the world can be made coherent. The line works because it hijacks religious language not to preach, but to expose how faith functions as a psychological technology. You can’t fully prove God; you can’t fully prove that design will redeem a messy brief, a stubborn material, a fickle audience. Yet people act as if both are true because acting that way makes life livable.

The joke has teeth. By pairing design with divinity, Terence flatters the designer’s impulse to order chaos, then quietly needles it: optimism is the payoff, not the evidence. “Perhaps” is doing heavy lifting, a sly admission that this is speculation, not doctrine. It’s a playwright’s move - keeping the audience suspended between sincerity and skepticism, letting the punchline land without collapsing into cynicism.

In Terence’s world, “design” would have meant something closer to arrangement, plot, proportion - the craftedness of human affairs and the staged logic of comedy. Roman New Comedy runs on the hope that misunderstandings resolve, identities clarify, and social knots untie. To believe in good design is to bet that life, like a well-made play, tends toward meaning instead of random cruelty. The subtext: optimism isn’t naive; it’s a discipline. You choose it because without that wager, you can’t build - or write - anything at all.