Time & Perspective Quote by Elias Hicks

A cleric publicly refusing “any thing mysterious” is a small revolution in a profession built, at least in part, on mystery. Hicks isn’t merely declaring a preference for plain speech; he’s drawing a line between religion as lived moral practice and religion as theatrical metaphysics. “I consider it all lost time” has the clipped impatience of a man who thinks salvation can be delayed by the very people hired to explain it.

The subtext is an argument about authority. If spiritual truth is “the things that all of us can see and know if we will,” then access to it doesn’t run through specialized training, creeds, or clerical mediation. It runs through attention and willingness. That little conditional - “if we will” - does a lot of work: the obstacle is not complexity but choice, not hidden knowledge but moral and spiritual discipline. Hicks shifts the drama from decoding doctrine to resisting self-deception.

Context matters. As a Quaker minister in the early American republic, Hicks spoke from a tradition already suspicious of ornate theology and sacramental gatekeeping, emphasizing the Inner Light and an egalitarian spiritual competence. His stance also sits inside the broader democratizing currents of the period, when Americans were learning to distrust elites and prefer practical, experience-based claims over inherited systems.

He’s not anti-intellectual; he’s anti-obscurantist. The sentence is a quiet rebuke to religious professionals who confuse depth with darkness - and a dare to listeners: stop outsourcing your conscience.