He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

The line comes from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel *The Road* (2006). It is narrated in McCarthy’s spare, biblical cadence as the unnamed father travels south with his young son through a devastated landscape. With institutions, moral frameworks, and even language itself collapsing, the father’s remaining grounds for action are reduced to the child’s survival and the belief that the boy embodies whatever is left of goodness. The sentence appears in a reflective narrative moment rather than as dialogue in a social setting, crystallizing the father’s quasi-religious conviction that the child is his justification—his “warrant”—for continuing to live and to act ethically amid pervasive brutality.

McCarthy frames paternal love as a form of last theology. “Warrant” suggests both authorization and proof: the child is the father’s reason to go on and the evidence that moral meaning has not been extinguished. The second sentence pushes that claim into explicitly scriptural territory—if the boy is not “the word of God,” then God has never spoken—making the child a living revelation in a world where traditional signs of providence are absent. The passage also underscores the novel’s tension between faith and despair: belief is not grounded in doctrine or miracle, but in the fragile, embodied presence of the child and the father’s decision to treat that presence as sacred.