By What Authority - The Inner Light

American Political History · May 1, 2022 · 24m

In 1659 a woman stood on the gallows on Boston Common with a rope around her neck — and was cut down alive at the last moment, by a reprieve her son had ridden to win. She was Mary Dyer, condemned for being a Quaker who would not stay away. The next spring she walked back into Boston knowing it would kill her, to break an unjust law by forcing them to enforce it. This is the story of the idea she died for: the inner light, George Fox's claim that God speaks directly to every person, with no priest, no church, and no king standing in between — the most dangerous idea in the seventeenth-century…