"The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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