Faith & Spirit Quote by Minna Antrim

Minna Antrim’s line is a neat little scalpel aimed at the moral vanity that religion can license. The joke turns on a pivot: “for” versus “by.” A saint “lies for his religion” - not because he’s faithless, but because he’s loyal enough to justify distortion in the name of a higher good. The hypocrite “lies by it” - using religion less as a cause than as cover, a respectable costume that makes selfishness look like principle. It’s a distinction that flatters neither type, which is the point: Antrim refuses the comforting idea that holiness is simply honesty plus piety.

The subtext is that religious identity is not a guarantee of moral clarity; it can be a tool that sharpens self-deception. Saints, in this framing, aren’t pure. They’re pragmatic, sometimes ruthless, willing to bend truth to protect doctrine, community, or an image of the sacred. Hypocrites are opportunists, but they aren’t aliens in the pews; they’re the predictable byproduct of any system that rewards public virtue. When belief becomes social capital, “goodness” becomes performative, and performance invites fraud.

Antrim wrote in an era when religious respectability was still a major credential in public life. The line lands because it compresses a whole sociology of virtue into a grammar lesson: motives hide in prepositions. It’s witty, yes, but the bite comes from its refusal to let sanctity off the hook.