Love Quote by Elias Hicks

Hicks turns Christianity into a stress test, not a membership badge. In a single sentence he strips the faith down to two commands that are easy to recite and brutal to live: love God above all, and love your neighbor with the same seriousness you reserve for your own skin. The word "certainly" is doing quiet combat here. It signals impatience with doctrinal hair-splitting and performative piety, as if Hicks is saying: if we are going to use the label Christian, it should cash out in recognizable moral behavior.

The subtext is also distinctly Quaker, and distinctly Hicks. As a leading voice among American Friends, he resisted creeds and the kind of Christianity that treats belief as the main event. For Hicks, the proof is inward transformation that becomes outward ethics: humility over hierarchy, conscience over clerical gatekeeping, compassion over compliance. That emphasis helped fuel the Hicksite-Orthodox split in the 1820s, when Quakers argued over authority, scripture, and the nature of Christ. Hicks' move is to reroute the argument away from metaphysics and back toward moral outcome.

"Neighbour" matters, too: it refuses the comfortable version of community. In an early American society stratified by class, race, and denomination, neighbor-love becomes a destabilizing demand. Loving God "above all" is not a withdrawal from the world; it becomes the measure by which you can no longer justify cruelty, exploitation, or indifference with religious language.