Wit & Attitude Quote by Richard Steele

Marriage, Steele suggests, is the most efficient spiritual simulator humans have ever built: the same institution can feel like salvation or damnation, and the difference hinges on one fragile variable - affection. That’s a pointed claim from a dramatist of the early 18th century, writing in a culture obsessed with “the married state” as social infrastructure. In Steele’s England, marriage was less a private romance than a public contract: property, reputation, lineage, and gender hierarchy all funneled through it. By calling it the “completest image” of heaven and hell, he elevates a domestic arrangement into a moral theatre, the exact terrain where a playwright’s imagination naturally goes.

The line works because it’s both pious and subversive. Pious, in its religious metaphor; subversive, in its implication that the church-and-law version of marriage is not self-justifying. Without “the affection suitable to it,” the institution doesn’t merely disappoint - it becomes infernal. Steele smuggles a critique of loveless, strategic matches under the cover of orthodox language, making an emotional argument in a period that often treated emotion as optional.

The phrasing “capable of receiving” also matters: it’s not just that marriage contains heaven or hell, but that it’s the most our earthly senses can handle. Domestic life becomes the limit-case of human experience, compressing ecstasy and misery into daily proximity. Steele isn’t idealizing marriage so much as warning that it magnifies whatever you bring to it - and that society’s favorite stabilizing institution is, privately, a high-risk experiment.