The expression “know yourself” served as an epitome of ancient wisdom according to which appropriate self-knowledge is the ground of all other knowledge. This sentiment also came to expression in Christian theology and spirituality. Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola began his Spiritual Exercises with a week of exercises designed to bring a retreatant to consciousness of her or his many sins. The Protestant Reformer John Calvin - whose career at the University of Paris may have overlapped that of Ignatius Loyola by a few weeks in the summer of 1535 - began later editions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion with a consideration of “The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves Mutually Connected” and Calvin's point was that there is no proper knowledge of the self except in relationship to God: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7). Thus, John Wesley wrote to one of his correspondents in 1768, “The knowledge of ourselves is true humility.” Wesley's mature understanding of the “way of salvation” involved not only a spiritual “awakening,” by which a sinner came to know himself or herself in the eyes of God as desperately needing divine grace, but also the “repentance of believers” according to which the believer has continually to “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.” The careful examination of one's own experience was a critical component of the Christian life as Wesley taught it.