Life & Wisdom Quote by Harriet Martineau

Martineau’s line is a quiet demolition job: it strips religion of its usual props - doctrine, ritual, institutional belonging - and rehouses it in the realm of disposition. Calling religion “a temper” suggests an orientation you carry the way you carry patience or suspicion: a habitual stance toward life, other people, and uncertainty. “Not a pursuit” rejects the flattering modern idea that faith is a noble hobby for the self-improving, a scenic hike toward transcendence with milestones and merit badges. Martineau is warning that when religion becomes a pursuit, it turns acquisitive: you collect proofs, experiences, conversions, and moral credentials. You don’t become devout; you become busy.

The subtext has teeth. A “pursuit” is goal-driven, competitive, legible to an audience - exactly the mode that Victorian piety often slipped into, where public respectability and spiritual seriousness were tangled together. Martineau, a dissenter and a clear-eyed observer of social hypocrisy, is pointing to the way organized religion can reward performance over character. By contrast, “temper” is private, durable, and revealing under pressure. It shows up when no one is watching, when the sermon ends and the household begins.

There’s also a proto-modern psychology here: faith as temperament, not a checklist. Martineau anticipates a secular critique of religion-as-credential while preserving the possibility that what matters is the moral weather inside a person. The line works because it refuses the usual battlefield of belief and disbelief and shifts the argument to conduct and consistency.