Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Williams

A backhanded benediction masquerading as ecclesial history: Williams takes Christ's promise to Peter - that "the gates of hell shall not prevail" - and reads it with the weary precision of someone who has watched institutions confuse survival for sanctity. The joke is the wound. The Church, across centuries of power, schism, corruption, and occasional brilliance, can often claim only this negative victory: it has not been finally crushed. Not that it has consistently healed, enlightened, or ennobled, but that it has endured.

Williams' intent is less to sneer at faith than to demote triumphalism. By saying this is "about all" one can feel the Church has "not done", he flips the usual narrative. The Church loves to present itself as an engine of moral progress or a steady guardian of truth; Williams implies its most reliable talent is avoiding total spiritual extinction. It's a devastatingly modest metric, and that's the point: when an institution wraps itself in divine inevitability, it starts treating its own continuity as proof of righteousness.

The subtext carries an editor's sensibility: a suspicion of grand claims, an eye for what the record actually supports. The line also lands in Williams' 20th-century shadow - after mechanized war and collapsing certainties - when religious authority had to answer not only for private failures but for public complicity. "Not prevailed against" becomes a grim comfort, a thin thread of hope, and a warning: mere persistence is not the same as fidelity.