People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

This aphorism is associated with Samuel Butler (1835–1902), the Victorian satirist and critic of religious and social hypocrisy. Butler was raised in a clerical family and educated for the Church, but he broke with orthodox Christianity and became known for skeptical, often epigrammatic attacks on conventional piety. The remark reflects a late‑19th‑century English milieu in which public respectability demanded deference to Christian belief, while the ethical demands of Christianity—humility, forgiveness, charity, and self-denial—were frequently treated as impractical or even socially disruptive when taken seriously. Butler’s work repeatedly targets this gap between professed belief and lived practice.

Butler’s point is a paradox about social conformity: many people react with outrage both to open skepticism (“hearing the Christian religion doubted”) and to genuine discipleship (“seeing it practiced”). The first outrage defends communal identity and respectability; the second arises because authentic Christian ethics can indict comfortable habits and expose moral inconsistency. The line satirizes a culture that prefers Christianity as a badge or rhetoric rather than as a demanding way of life. It also implies that what is often protected is not the religion’s substance but its social function—so that both disbelief and sincere practice threaten the same complacent equilibrium.