  Fell thus severely criticizes those men or “blind Priests” who “pervert the Apostles Words, and corrupt his intent” by “contemning and despising” women in order to prevent them from speaking in church (10, 14). To prevent a woman from speaking is to limit the power of Christ “whose Power and Spirit is infinite, that is pouring it upon all flesh” (12). She sees the priests’ tendency as part of a larger tendency of “the spirit of Darkness” (i.e. the state-sanctioned church) to prevent both Quaker men and women from spreading the message of God. Fell foretells of a new age dawning “which brings freedom and liberty” (11), and in which all those who are in the spirit of the Lord (men as well as women) can speak freely, without prejudice and persecution. In this sense, her book is (implicitly, at least) a continuation of her fight for liberty of conscience and the rights of “free-born English men and women” in her other works (Fell 1664, 1; cf. also Skwire 2015).