Fatherhood Quote by Elias Hicks

Hicks is smuggling a radical theology into the familiar domestic metaphor of inheritance. If a human son shares his father’s “nature and spirit,” then the “sons of God” are not merely devotees performing obedience; they are meant to participate in God’s own life. The line reads like gentle pastoral counsel, but its intent is insurgent: it relocates religious authority from external institutions to an internal transformation that anyone can undergo.

Context matters. As a leading Quaker minister, Hicks preached in a tradition already suspicious of priestly gatekeeping and fluent in the language of the “Inner Light.” In the early American republic, that emphasis could feel both democratic and destabilizing. If the decisive credential is being “born of the spirit of God,” then creeds, sacraments, and clerical hierarchies become secondary - possibly even distractions. The subtext is an argument about who gets to claim spiritual legitimacy: the church that certifies you, or the spirit that remakes you.

The rhetoric works because it uses the logic of bloodline to break the spell of bloodline. “Sonship” suggests exclusivity, but Hicks expands it: “all who are born” may belong. He keeps the Christian family vocabulary while shifting its engine from biology to experience, from inherited status to lived “nature and spirit.” It’s an appeal that flatters no one’s résumé and offers no shortcuts; it demands resemblance, not affiliation. In Hicks’s hands, kinship becomes a moral test: if you claim the Father, you should start to look like him.