Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Wood Krutch

Krutch’s punchline lands because it weaponizes our own vocabulary against us. “Vandal” is a moral verdict: mindless, antisocial destruction of something we built and therefore value. “Sportsman,” by contrast, is a medal word, a term that laundered violence into virtue for generations of American and British elites. By swapping the object - “works of man” versus “works of god” - he exposes the crooked accounting behind what we choose to mourn.

The intent isn’t just to shame hunters; it’s to indict a cultural hierarchy where property and monuments trigger outrage, while living systems are treated as expendable scenery. Krutch’s phrasing presses on an old religious register (“works of god”) not because he’s preaching theology, but because it’s the clearest available language for intrinsic value: forests and animals are not “resources” until we decide they are. The subtext is sharper: modern society claims refinement, yet it still needs sanctioned rituals of domination, and it grants that sanction through euphemism.

Context matters. Writing in an era when conservation often meant managing nature for “wise use” - game populations, recreation, profit - Krutch is closer to preservationist moral clarity. He’s challenging the gentlemanly mythology of fair chase and the idea that killing can be cleansed by etiquette. The line works as satire precisely because it mirrors our public reactions: break a statue, you’re a criminal; erase a species, you’re outdoorsy.