Daily Inspiration Quote by Julia Ward Howe

A prayer that doubles as a permission slip: Howe asks for forgiveness in advance, but the real move is insisting that her "wrong" might be nothing more than obedience to her own moral hardware. "Ardor" is the tell. It frames her drive not as a chilly ideological choice but as heat, appetite, compulsion. She is naming desire as duty, and daring a religious culture to admit that conscience can be as forceful as any commandment.

The line works because it plays chicken with two authorities at once. On the surface, God is the judge; underneath, nature is the legislator. By calling her impulses "the strongest instincts of my nature", she implies inevitability - a law written into her body and mind. That phrase smuggles in a proto-feminist argument: if a woman is told that ambition, public speech, rage at injustice, or sexual independence is "unnatural", she can answer that the unnatural part is the demand for her to be small.

In context, Howe lived in a century that treated activism - abolitionism, women's rights, moral reform - as admirable in the abstract and scandalous in the female flesh. For a woman in public, "wrong" often meant "unseemly". The sentence anticipates that social verdict and refuses to internalize it. It's not defiant atheism; it's devout negotiation: keep your God, but stop using Him as a ventriloquist for patriarchy.