Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins is confessing an unnervingly modern thing: the private sorting mechanism that clicks on the moment he meets someone. For a poet-priest (a Jesuit convert in a Protestant nation), religion isn’t a topic you “discuss”; it’s a diagnostic, an instant read of kinship and distance. The line’s force comes from how candidly it admits bias while dressing it in the language of inevitability. “Enters very deep” sounds like spiritual intimacy, but it’s also an invasion. Faith arrives as atmosphere, not argument, and it rearranges every social interaction before the person has even finished introducing themselves.

The subtext is tribal, even when the diction is pious. “They are or they are not of my religion” reduces a whole human being to a binary that feels both absolute and shamefully simplistic. Hopkins doesn’t claim this is admirable; he calls it his “deepest impression,” as if recognizing the embarrassing truth that his most immediate perception is not temperament, class, wit, or kindness, but affiliation. That blunt “my” matters: this is not abstract Religion with a capital R, but ownership, boundary, and belonging.

Context sharpens the confession. Hopkins lived in the long aftershock of the Reformation, when English Catholicism carried social penalties and a constant sense of siege. As a Jesuit, he was trained to read the soul; as a lonely, intense poet, he was trained to feel everything. The line exposes how devotion can become a social filter: tenderness and suspicion sharing the same root.