Politics & Power Quote by William Robertson Smith

A Victorian assumption gets quietly detonated here: that religion is a private hotline between a solitary soul and a singular God. Smith is pushing against the Protestant-inflected common sense of his era, where faith looks like inward belief, personal conscience, and individual salvation. His real target isn’t piety; it’s a category error. If you start with the modern individual as the basic religious “atom,” you misread vast stretches of human history.

The key phrase is “hardly enter into the idea,” a politely phrased indictment of intellectual provincialism. Smith is telling his readers that their difficulty imagining national religion isn’t evidence that such a thing is primitive or mistaken; it’s evidence that their own habits of thought are narrow. The subtext: modern Europeans have mistaken their theological psychology for a universal template.

Calling the nation “in its national organisation” the “religious unit” reframes religion as something enacted through institutions, rituals, laws, and shared obligations. In that model, belonging matters as much as believing. Religion becomes less about what you think in your head and more about what you do with other people, under a public authority, on a calendar, in a place. That’s why the line lands: it shifts the ground from private sincerity to collective structure.

Contextually, Smith sits at the crossroads of late-19th-century anthropology, biblical criticism, and comparative religion, when scholars were arguing that “ancient religion” was inseparable from civic life. Read now, the quote also needles modern secular confidence: even when we claim religion has retreated into privacy, nations keep manufacturing sacred forms - flags, martyrs, ceremonies - that look suspiciously like the old unit, rebooted.