Chapter 6 - Fellow Heirs, Travelers, and Sojourners

Summary

To George Blood, Wollstonecraft admitted that she felt “particularly attached to those who are heirs of the promises, and travel on in the thorny path with the same Christian hopes that render my severe trials a cause of thankfulness” (Todd, CL 54; emphasis in original). Wollstonecraft did have a sense of fellowship with other Christians and that she was not alone as she ran her race (68). In Thoughts, she affirmed her faith that “It is our preferring the things that are not seen, to those which are, that proves us to be the heirs of promise” (108). “Heirs,” “travelers,” “thorny paths,” “trials,” and “race” are all biblical metaphors for the experiences in life that Christians are called to endure as they grow to be more like Christ and to serve their Maker. More to the point of this study, although there were many different groups of thinkers and proponents of a variety of religious doctrines during the end of the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft was aware that she felt a particular kinship with evangelical Christians, and that was because she identified herself as one. Referring to those who are “heirs of the promises” refers to many verses in the New Testament, but primarily to Rom. 8. It is this chapter that clarifies for us what Wollstonecraft believed, at least in 1785. She would not live in condemnation because her sins were forgiven by the death of Christ (1–3). She would not be legalistic because she knew that the law condemned, but to live in the Spirit was freedom (3–4). But that also meant that she would not be “carnally minded” because to be otherwise robbed her of “life and peace” and put her in “enmity against God” (5–12). To be “led by the Spirit of God” not only made her a child of God through adoption (14–15), it placed her in a spiritual family which made her “joint-heirs” with Christ and other Christians who “suffer with Him” so that even though they were “made subject to vanity” (20), a condition to which she would refer often in Rights of Woman, they would “be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (21).

This portrait of Wollstonecraft runs counter to those depicted by most Wollstonecraftian scholars. In fact, it runs counter to how many postmodernists look at the Age of Enlightenment in general.