Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Freedom, Meredith implies, doesn’t start at the ballot box or the barricade; it starts in the mind’s refusal to outsource truth. “Priestcraft” is the key barb here. He’s not just naming priests as people, but priestcraft as a system: the trained machinery of authority that turns spiritual life into a technology of control. By pairing “priestcraft and priests,” he catches both the institution and its human agents, suggesting that even sincere individuals can become instruments of a larger disciplining apparatus.

The line works because it redraws the map of political struggle. Most fights for liberty target visible coercion - kings, laws, armies. Meredith is arguing that the deeper conquest is metaphysical: who gets to define reality, morality, salvation, guilt. If that power sits with a clerical class, every other freedom is conditional, revocable, and laced with shame. His phrase “striking deeper” frames anti-clerical resistance as foundational, not merely sectarian. It’s a claim about root causes: change the doctrine-policing engine, and other freedoms can actually take hold.

Context matters. Meredith writes in a 19th-century Britain still negotiating the long hangover of established religion, the Oxford Movement’s revival of Anglican ritual, Catholic emancipation anxieties, and a culture where respectability often came with a church seal. As a novelist, he’s attuned to how authority colonizes private life: desire, marriage, women’s choices, the scripts of “virtue.” This isn’t atheism as posture; it’s liberty as psychological self-rule, aimed at the quiet tyranny of certainty.