A Sentimental Journey associates religion with hypocrisy and sexual repression, yet some characters’ religious sentiments motivate them to admirable behavior. Thus, the novel suggests that religion can be either a negative or positive force, depending on the motives of the people practicing it. In a characteristic episode satirizing organized religion, the narrator Yorick persuades the aging Frenchwoman Madame de V***, who claims she “believe[s] nothing,” to renounce her nihilism. He persuades her not by talking about God, but by claiming that only religion could protect a woman as beautiful as she is from male sexual attentions. The story implies that Madame de V*** becomes interested in organized religion again due to Yorick’s sexual flattery—a vain and hypocritical motive, since Yorick is also arguing that religion represses sexuality. In episodes like these, the novel evinces a healthy skepticism for religion in general—and, perhaps, European Catholicism in particular. Yet not all religious characters in A Sentimental Journey are vain, repressed hypocrites. Traveling through France toward Italy, Yorick meets a peasant family who dance every evening after dinner to thank God with “a chearful and contented mind.” The novel represents this joyous, physical, non-repressive religious worship as admirable. In A Sentimental Journey, then, whether religion is good or bad depends not on religion itself, but on the worshipers’ motives and personalities.
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Religion Quotes in A Sentimental Journey
I guard this box, as I would the instrumental parts of my religion, to help my mind on to something better: in truth, I seldom go abroad without it; and oft and many a time have I called up by it the courteous spirit of its owner to regulate my own, in the justlings of the world[.]
‘Twas only in the power, says the Fragment, of the God whose empire extendeth from heaven to earth, and even to the depths of the sea, to have done this.
But there is nothing unmixt in this world; and some of the gravest of our divines have carried it so far as to affirm, that enjoyment itself was attended even with a sigh—and that the greatest they knew of, terminated in a general way, in little better than a convulsion.
I told Madame de V*** it might be her principle; but I was sure it could not be her interest to level the outworks, without which I could not conceive how such a citadel as hers could be defended—that there was not a more dangerous thing in the world, than for a beauty to be a deist—that it was a debt I owed my creed, not to conceal it from her—that I had not been five minutes sat upon the sopha besides her, but I had begun to form designs—and what is it, but the sentiments of religion, and the persuasion they had existed in her breast, which could have check’d them as they rose up.
I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it with my own—and then in hers—and then in mine—and then I wip’d hers again—and as I did it, I felt such indescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.
I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary.
Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ‘tis thou who lifts him up to HEAVEN—eternal fountain of our feelings!—‘tis here I trace thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs within me […] that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great—great SENSORIUM of the world!
I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance—but as I had never seen her so engaged, I should have look’d upon it now, as one of the illusions of an imagination which is eternally misleading me, had not the old man, as soon as the dance ended, said, that this was their constant way; and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice; believing, he said, that a chearful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay—
—Or a learned prelate either, said I.
