Wit & Attitude Quote by Frank Harris

A provocation disguised as theology, Harris is really doing cultural triage. He pits a human-scaled Jesus (spirit, inspiration, love) against an institutional Paul, recast as the patron saint of moral bookkeeping. The insult in "idiotic morality" is strategic: it’s not just contempt for doctrine, it’s contempt for the kind of personality that prefers rules to transformation. Harris wants the reader to feel that Christianity didn’t merely take a wrong turn; it chose the wrong psychological temperament.

The subtext is Victorian and post-Victorian in its obsessions. Harris is writing from an era when "respectability" policed sex, pleasure, and even tenderness, while public life ran on empire, industry, and hypocrisy. In that world, Paul becomes a convenient villain: the scriptural alibi for turning desire into guilt and surveillance. When Harris says love becomes a "fiend", he’s describing moral inversion: the church frames the very energy that binds people together as a threat that must be quarantined, confessed, punished. "Capital sin" lands like an indictment of how institutions weaponize language to make internal enemies out of ordinary impulses.

Context matters: Harris was a scandal-adjacent literary figure, shaped by the fin-de-siecle revolt against puritanism and the rising appetite for psycho-sexual honesty. His intent isn’t careful biblical scholarship; it’s rhetoric with a point. He’s arguing that the church’s real betrayal wasn’t doctrinal error but a civilizational choice: to build a moral regime on suspicion of the body rather than trust in love.