Life & Mortality Quote by Elias Hicks

A neat trap is being set here: the famous “thief on the cross” is usually deployed as Christianity’s ultimate loophole - a last-minute pardon that makes moral procrastination look almost reasonable. Hicks yanks that comfort away. His “Therefore” signals he’s not offering a warm devotional reflection; he’s drawing a conclusion meant to discipline the imagination. If you want a model for your deathbed, he implies, you don’t get to choose the photogenic repentant criminal. Scripture supplies two thieves, and the other one dies sneering.

The intent is pastoral, but the instrument is fear of self-deception. Hicks isn’t primarily arguing that God won’t forgive; he’s warning that a life of practiced resistance reshapes what you’re even capable of at the end. “Take courage” is the key phrase: he’s policing the emotional permission people give themselves to keep sinning because grace exists. In that sense, the target isn’t “sinners” in the abstract but respectable hearers who would like repentance to function like insurance: pay later, collect now.

Context matters. As a Quaker preacher, Hicks distrusted cheap, externalized salvation narratives that let a person remain unchanged while claiming safety. The subtext is inward and psychological: hardness becomes habit. The final jab - “reproach death itself” - intensifies the warning. The worst case isn’t punishment after death; it’s meeting death with a bitter, defiant spirit, too calloused to recognize the very mercy it banked on.