Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Stewart

A novelist’s most delicious provocation is to take a pious old proverb and sharpen it into an indictment. Stewart riffs on the familiar “mills of God grind slowly,” then flips the tempo: divine judgment, she suggests, is practically instantaneous when you set it beside the law. The joke has teeth. We’re trained to fear cosmic justice as distant and implacable, but Stewart points her glare at the human systems that are supposed to be immediate, legible, and fair.

The intent isn’t devotional; it’s diagnostic. “The law” here isn’t an abstract ideal but the lived experience of bureaucracy: delays, procedure as theater, a timetable that protects institutions more than people. By making God’s “mills” move “like lightning,” she implies that even superstition outperforms courts at delivering resolution. That’s a bleak compliment to the heavens and a brutal review of civic life.

Subtextually, the line carries a novelist’s cynicism about causality. In fiction, consequences arrive on cue; in reality, legal outcomes can feel random, negotiated, or postponed into meaninglessness. Stewart’s comparison also smuggles in class and power: if you can afford time, lawyers, and appeals, the law’s slowness becomes a strategy. If you can’t, it’s a sentence.

Context matters: Stewart wrote in a 20th-century Britain living with postwar institutions, expanding bureaucracy, and the mythos of order. The line lands because it’s compact, reversible, and slightly heretical - a moral universe that’s faster than the one we built, which is exactly the kind of irony that keeps readers nodding and wincing at once.