Daily Inspiration Quote by Elias Hicks

Creeds are doing double duty here: they claim to protect faith, but Hicks treats them as a technology of control. The line starts with a weary, almost pastoral shrug - "about many other things of the same nature" - then tightens into an accusation. It is not just that people believe the wrong things; it is that institutions actively "make people believe", manufacturing certainty where experience and conscience are messier. Hicks is aiming at the machinery of organized religion: the way doctrine hardens into tests of belonging, and how those tests conveniently preserve the authority of whoever writes them.

The subtext is classic Quaker: suspicion of secondhand religion, insistence on the Inner Light, impatience with theological gatekeeping. Hicks (a key figure in the Hicksite split among American Quakers) spoke in an early U.S. culture anxious to build respectable churches and coherent national morals. Creeds, in that moment, weren’t neutral summaries; they were social infrastructure - passports, border walls, loyalty oaths. His "we" is surgical. He includes himself and his community, making the critique feel like confession rather than mere polemic, while still landing the punch: creed-making is a way to sanctify "our own will."

Calling that will "the ground of all sin" reframes sin as less about individual vice and more about spiritual imperialism: the urge to turn private preference into universal law. Hicks is warning that the most dangerous hypocrisy isn’t the obvious kind; it’s the pious certainty that baptizes power as truth.