Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Le Gallienne is drawing a hard border between the timeless itch religion scratches and the worldly apparatus built around it. By calling the spiritual element "the really important part", he quietly demotes everything most institutions use to prove they matter: calendars, geography, rules, and the surveillance of behavior. Time and Space aren’t just physics here; they’re shorthand for the administrative mindset that turns transcendence into schedules (holy days, services), territories (churches, nations, sects), and credentials (orthodoxy, membership). The jab lands because it’s delivered in a poet’s register: airy, absolute, almost serene. That calm is its provocation.

The subtext is a late-19th/early-20th-century modernist impatience with Victorian moralism and ecclesiastical gatekeeping. Le Gallienne came of age when religion in the Anglo world was often fused to social respectability, empire, and a tightening web of “conduct” codes. His line rejects the idea that spirituality is best measured by compliance. It also sidesteps doctrinal fights by implying they’re category errors: arguments about “temporary mundane laws” can only ever govern bodies in time and space, not whatever a soul is supposed to be.

There’s a risky elegance to it. By severing spirit from conduct, he opens a door to private, interior faith that feels liberating - and to a faith so abstract it can’t be held accountable. That tension is the point: he’s insisting religion isn’t primarily a system for managing people, it’s a language for encountering what management can’t touch.