Faith & Spirit Quote by John Jewel

Humility, here, isn’t a personality trait; it’s a disciplinary technology. When John Jewel writes, "The word of God teacheth lowliness of mind; it teacheth us to know ourselves", he’s not offering a gentle devotional aside. He’s sketching a program for how authority should work in a newly contested religious world: scripture doesn’t merely comfort, it tutors the self into a smaller, more governable shape.

Jewel is speaking from the hot center of the English Reformation, when claims about God were also claims about legitimacy, institutions, and who gets to interpret reality. As a leading defender of the Church of England, he needed an account of religion that could underwrite Protestant priorities without sounding like raw power politics. "Know ourselves" does that elegantly. It frames reform as moral clarity rather than factional victory: if scripture is the teacher, the believer is the student, and pride is the principal enemy. That’s a shrewd pivot away from inherited status (saints, priests, tradition) and toward an inward audit of conscience.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, it dignifies the ordinary reader: you don’t need spiritual elites to be brought low; the text itself can do the work. On the other, it preempts dissent by recasting disagreement as ego. If the Word teaches "lowliness", then resistance to the approved reading can be painted as self-importance masquerading as principle.

The line works because it fuses psychology with theology: humility becomes epistemology. To "know ourselves" is to accept limits, and in Jewel’s moment, accepting limits was a civic as well as a spiritual virtue.