Margaret Fell Quotes on God
Margaret Fell (1614–1702), commonly called the "Mother of Quakerism," gave the early Religious Society of Friends much of its institutional and doctrinal foundation through her partnership with George Fox (whom she married in 1669) and through her own substantial philosophical and pastoral writings. Women's Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666), composed during her imprisonment at Lancaster Castle, defended the case that the inward Light of Christ is given to women as fully as to men and that the scriptural prohibitions against women's public religious speech, properly understood, do not apply to those moved by the Spirit to deliver the gospel — supplying one of the earliest systematic Christian theological defenses of women's ministerial authority.
Quotes
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Attributed to Margaret Fell:
“It is not the custom of men but the Spirit of God that authorizes who may speak.”
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Attributed to Margaret Fell:
“Women's speaking is justified, proved, and allowed of by the Scriptures.”
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Attributed to Margaret Fell:
“The Light of Christ is in every man and every woman, and waits for the speech of either.”
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Attributed to Margaret Fell:
“Outward forms of worship are the husks; the kernel is the inward listening.”
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Attributed to Margaret Fell:
“What is written by the Spirit, the Spirit also enables to speak.”
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“Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.”
Recipe to prevent the cold of January from utterly destroying life" (30 January 1841), quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson , p. 97