Fatherhood Quote by Elias Hicks

A plainspoken mysticism is doing quiet insurgent work here: Hicks isn’t pleading for louder belief, but for a bigger interior. “Enlarged in love” frames devotion as expansion rather than compliance, a deliberately anti-legalistic move from a Quaker preacher who distrusted religious performance. The line slides past doctrine-as-scorekeeping and aims at the affective core: not what you assent to, but what you are capacious enough to hold.

The real pivot is “turn inward.” In early American Protestant culture, authority was often mediated by clergy, creeds, and public signs of righteousness. Hicks re-centers the spiritual life in the individual conscience, where the “blessed comforter” (the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel) is accessible without institutional gatekeeping. He’s borrowing mainstream Christian language - “Jesus said the Father would send” - while subtly relocating where that promise is fulfilled: not in sacrament or hierarchy, but in direct inward experience.

That rhetorical strategy matters in context. Hicks became the face of a major Quaker split (Hicksite vs. Orthodox) precisely because his emphasis on the “Inner Light” sounded, to opponents, like a downgrade of external authority and even a softening of traditional Christology. Yet the quote’s Christ-centered phrasing is also a shield: he anchors the inward turn in Jesus’s own words, claiming continuity even as he advances a radical spiritual democracy.

The intent is pastoral but politically charged: enlarge love, and you loosen the grip of fear, credentialed religion, and social conformity. The subtext is liberation disguised as devotion.