Time & Perspective Quote by Elias Hicks

Sin here is less a scandalous act than a behavioral groove, a habit that rewires the chooser. Hicks, a Quaker minister preaching in the early American republic, is doing something shrewd: he shifts the drama of morality away from one-off transgressions and toward the slow, almost physical process of becoming. The menace isn’t divine lightning. It’s acclimation.

His key verb is “continue.” The warning targets repetition, not mere failure. “Rebel and harden our hearts” reads like biblical cadence, but the psychology is practical: you don’t wake up one day a villain; you practice your way there. By saying we become “inured and fixed,” Hicks borrows the language of callus and cement. The subtext is that conscience is not an infinite resource; it can be worn down, dulled into silence, until wrongdoing feels like home.

That’s why the line lands on the most unsettling point: “it will be natural.” Hicks is pressing on a fear that still resonates in secular terms: that what feels “natural” can be an engineered preference, the result of repeated choices. Notice the pivot from compulsion to consent: “we shall choose it from time to time.” He’s not excusing people as trapped; he’s indicting them as habituated. The danger is a moral muscle memory that keeps reasserting itself, even when the stakes aren’t high.

In a culture flirting with new freedoms and new commercial temptations, Hicks frames sin as a self-made environment: keep living in it, and eventually it starts living in you.