Hidden from the Prudent

Hidden from the Prudent is a religious work by John Paul Jones, the American Protestant missionary writer who worked in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The title draws on the New Testament verse from Matthew 11:25 in which Jesus thanks God for having hidden things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes.

The biblical text has been a central one in Christian devotional and theological writing across the centuries, with large reflection on the paradoxical relationship between worldly wisdom and spiritual understanding that the verse points to. Jones uses the text as the framework for a meditation on the nature of religious understanding and the limits of conventional intellectual approaches to genuine spiritual knowledge.

The book belongs to the broader American Protestant devotional literature of the period and reflects the assumptions of late Victorian and Edwardian missionary Christianity. The treatment combines biblical exegesis with practical religious application in the manner that the sizable American Protestant pastoral literature of the period typically used.