Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare’s line lands like a Victorian parlor verdict dressed up as an aerodynamic fact: atheism, he implies, is not merely wrong but atmospherically incompatible with the human mind. The image does the heavy lifting. An “exhausted receiver” suggests a dead telephone line, a drained vessel, a body after the spirit has departed. In that emptiness, “the mind cannot use its wings” - an old Romantic trope of intellect as flight - and the inability to soar becomes “proof” that the mind is “out of its element,” like a bird trapped underwater.

The intent isn’t to argue atheism down with evidence; it’s to frame atheism as aesthetically and psychologically infertile. “No being eloquent” is a dare and a dismissal at once: try to make unbelief sing, Hare suggests, and your rhetoric will betray you. Subtext: faith isn’t just a doctrine but a medium that makes meaning possible; remove it and language collapses into mechanics. That’s a savvy move in a period when scientific materialism and biblical criticism were forcing educated Christians to defend not only belief, but belief’s cultural prestige.

Contextually, Hare writes from the late-19th-century Anglican world where religion underwrote moral seriousness and social coherence. Calling atheism an “element” the mind can’t breathe in is also a class-coded claim about taste: unbelief is cast as spiritually vulgar, incapable of grandeur. It’s a rhetorical checkmate that works less by logic than by insinuation - if atheism feels flat, that flatness becomes the verdict.