Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s move here is to yank piety and atheism into the same courtroom and call them both guilty of bad manners. The line starts like a devotional promise - know God better - then flips into a paradox: the closer you get, the more you discover that “knowing” is the wrong verb. It’s a neat Victorian scalpel stroke against the era’s confidence that everything could be cataloged, classified, and pinned down with the right system, whether that system was church doctrine or the new prestige of scientific explanation.

The subtext is less “believe in God” than “stop pretending your certainty is mature.” Butler treats God as the ultimate stress test for intellectual humility. Denial can be childish because it imagines the universe small enough to be dismissed; definition can be childish because it imagines the infinite domesticated into a creed, a diagram, a slogan. He’s not splitting the difference to sound balanced. He’s accusing both camps of the same narcissism: the need to make reality fit inside our language.

Context matters. Butler lived in the aftermath of Darwin, when traditional faith was being publicly argued like a policy proposal, and religious orthodoxy was hardening into defensive literalism. His irony cuts both ways: theology becomes suspect not because it reaches too high, but because it claims to have reached the top. The quote works because it weaponizes reverence against certainty, making humility the only intellectually respectable stance.