Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft loads this sentence like a courtroom indictment: religion isn’t merely mistaken, it’s been engineered into an economic machine. The hook is her biting asymmetry - “the only men who exercised their reason” are “the priests.” It’s not praise; it’s a scalpel. In a society that congratulated itself on enlightenment while keeping most people, especially women, deliberately uneducated, she implies that “reason” has been hoarded and weaponized by a clerical class. Rationality becomes less a noble faculty than a professional advantage.

Her key move is transactional language. “Rapacity,” “secured,” “vast property,” “perishable substance” - these are the terms of law and commerce, not devotion. Salvation is presented as a purchase, and fear is the currency. The brutal elegance of “perishable substance” reduces a person’s life savings, land, even the material self, to something exchangeable and decaying. Against it stands purgatory: “dark torments,” an imaginative threat that can’t be audited but can be monetized. Wollstonecraft’s subtext is that superstition survives because it’s profitable, and because those with institutional power know exactly how to make the invisible feel urgent.

Context matters: late-18th-century Britain and Europe were arguing over church wealth, corruption, and the political authority of clergy in the wake of Enlightenment critique and revolutionary ferment. Wollstonecraft, already suspicious of any institution that trains obedience, frames the church as an early master of psychological governance: sell terror, buy property, call it moral order. The sting is that the bargain looks voluntary, but it’s conducted under duress.