Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Ken

Ken’s line is a velvet-robed power move: it doesn’t merely ask for humility before God, it demands the demotion of the mind. “Any great mystery” signals the core Christian doctrines that resist tidy explanation, then “recorded in holy Writ” locks authority to scripture, not private inspiration or philosophical argument. The pivot comes with “prostrate” - not “yield” or “listen,” but a bodily verb of submission. Reason isn’t invited to collaborate; it’s told to lie face-down.

The intent sits squarely in late 17th-century Anglican piety, shaped by the aftershocks of civil war, sectarian fragmentation, and the perceived excesses of both enthusiasm (unregulated spiritual claims) and rationalist overreach. Ken, a devotional writer and bishop, is safeguarding a churchly order: doctrine as received, not debated into existence. The subtext is political as well as spiritual. If revelation outranks reason, then institutional interpreters of revelation gain leverage over the restless individual conscience.

The rhetoric works because it turns a potential weakness - mystery as lack of proof - into a badge of reverence. Mystery becomes a test: the truly faithful don’t solve it; they submit to it. For modern readers, the sentence lands like a warning label on certainty. It exposes a perennial religious temptation: to treat doubt not as a doorway to deeper inquiry, but as insubordination.