Daily Inspiration Quote by Elias Hicks

Hicks swings at a polite heresy of his day: the idea that revelation was a one-time spectacular event, now safely archived in scripture and church history. His line is a Quaker cudgel, blunt and quietly radical. If you claim revelation has “ceased,” he implies, you’re not being pious or cautious; you’re being epistemologically naive. The real scandal is his redefinition of revelation from rare miracle to the everyday condition of knowing at all.

The intent is tactical. Early American Protestant culture was consolidating authority in texts, creeds, and credentialed clergy. Hicks, a Quaker minister who emphasized the Inner Light, pulls the rug out from that arrangement. He doesn’t argue that people should be allowed private mystical experiences. He argues something more destabilizing: that every act of understanding already depends on an unveiling we didn’t manufacture. “Man knows not the least thing on earth” is deliberately sweeping, shrinking the distance between Moses on Sinai and a farmer recognizing truth in his own conscience.

The subtext is also a warning about institutional pride. To announce the end of revelation is to crown yourself the manager of what God is permitted to say, and when. Hicks frames that as “ignorance” not because opponents lack information, but because they mistake secondhand certainty for living discernment.

Context matters: Hicks became a flashpoint in Quaker schism, accused of sidelining orthodox doctrines. This sentence is him staking the deeper claim: religion without ongoing revelation isn’t safer; it’s spiritually dead, and intellectually dishonest.