Faith Quote by Mary A. Ward

“The answer, of course” is doing a lot of quiet bullying here. Ward opens with the voice of someone who expects agreement, not debate, then narrows the camera: “in the mouth of a Christian teacher.” That framing matters. She’s not merely asserting a doctrine; she’s describing a socially authorized role, the person whose job is to turn uncertainty into reassurance. The line reads like a template for instruction: if you’re teaching Christianity, this is the sanctioned conclusion you’re meant to deliver.

The subtext is competitive and exclusionary, but delivered with velvet gloves. “In Christianity alone” makes joy and hope into proprietary goods, as if other worldviews can maybe offer moral seriousness or private comfort but not the full package. Ward pairs “present joy” with “future hope” like a sales pitch aimed at a particular anxiety: the fear that a good life now might cost you eternity, or that belief in eternity might require misery now. By claiming both, she collapses that tension and makes the faith uniquely efficient: it satisfies the emotional present and secures the metaphysical future.

Contextually, this sounds like the argument of a late-19th/early-20th century Christian public intellectual responding to modern doubt, secular ethics, and rival religious claims. The certainty (“of course”) isn’t just confidence; it’s defensive confidence, shoring up a community’s authority at a time when authority was being renegotiated. It works rhetorically because it offers a two-tier guarantee: happiness you can feel and meaning you can bank.