Fatherhood Quote by Mary Astell

Astell takes a theological commonplace - human worth comes from God, not from social rank - and sharpens it into a quiet weapon against the era that tried to render women spiritually serious but socially negligible. The line moves with lawyerly precision: our "relation" to divine wisdom confers "dignity", and without that relation we have "no pretence" to it. That word choice is doing the work. In a culture obsessed with pedigree and property, she strips dignity of its earthly paperwork and relocates it in a status no husband, father, or monarch can grant or revoke.

The subtext is proto-feminist without needing the modern label. Astell is writing in a world where women's "value" is often negotiated through marriage markets and manners. By insisting that the believer becomes "something, something considerable", she grants women a metaphysical standing that implicitly indicts their civic erasure. If God counts you as considerable, why shouldn't education, vocation, and intellectual life count you as considerable too?

Her rhetoric also carries a tactical humility. She doesn't claim inherent grandeur; she claims bestowed dignity, anchored in "the Father" and "the Son of His Love". That phrasing keeps her argument orthodox enough to survive, while smuggling in a radical consequence: the soul outranks the social order. Astell's genius is that she makes spiritual dependence sound like moral independence - a way to look at a rigged world and refuse its verdict.