Daily Inspiration Quote by John Jewel

Panic loves a headcount. "The number of witches had everywhere become enormous" is less an observation than a rhetorical accelerant, the kind that turns a scattered set of anxieties into a single, graspable threat. Coming from John Jewel, a leading English Protestant voice in the early Elizabethan settlement, the line lands inside a culture fighting over legitimacy: who has the true church, whose rituals are contamination, whose authority is real. When doctrine is contested, the devil becomes a useful character witness.

The phrasing does two quiet jobs at once. First, it smuggles in consensus: "everywhere" suggests a shared reality that doesn’t need proof. Second, it inflates urgency: "enormous" isn’t a statistic, it’s a mood. Jewel isn’t merely counting witches; he’s building a climate where extraordinary measures feel ordinary. Once you accept ubiquity, you accept surveillance. Once you accept enormity, you accept punishment. The sentence reads like an early modern version of "it’s out of control" - a phrase that pre-justifies crackdowns by making them seem like reluctant necessity.

The subtext is theological and political. Witches are never just rogue spellcasters; they are signs of a society out of order, evidence that God’s protection is being tested, and proof that enemies - often coded as the wrong kind of Christian, the wrong kind of neighbor, the wrong kind of woman - are active. Jewel’s authority as a clergyman matters here: if a pastor says the invisible war is escalating, the flock is primed to see misfortune as conspiracy, and doubt as complicity.