Life & Wisdom Quote by John Burroughs

A century of laboratories, patents, and public schools made the modern West feel like it was accelerating, and Burroughs is cashing in that sensation with a deliberately lopsided comparison. The line isn’t a careful cost-benefit audit of Christianity; it’s a provocation aimed at the cultural authority Christianity still claimed in Burroughs’s America. By stacking “one hundred years” against “eighteen hundred,” he turns history into a stopwatch and invites the reader to feel embarrassment: if progress is measurable, why has religion taken so long?

The subtext is late-19th-century confidence dressed as moral critique. Burroughs lived through Darwin’s shockwaves, the rise of professional science, electrification, germ theory, industrial scale, and a new class of experts who could explain - and change - the world without appealing to scripture. His quip reflects the era’s shift from salvation to systems: better sanitation beats better sermons; antibiotics beat absolution; mass literacy outpaces catechism.

“Development of western civilization” is the rhetorical hinge, because it smuggles in a particular definition of success: material capability, institutional complexity, control over nature. Christianity’s defenders could counter with art, ethics, abolition movements, or the slow formation of universities Burroughs is implicitly borrowing from. Burroughs anticipates that objection by choosing the word “development,” not “goodness.” He’s praising an engine, not a soul.

What makes the line work is its clean irreverence. Burroughs isn’t asking to discard faith; he’s demoting it from master narrative to private meaning, and crowning science as the public religion of results.