Humility in All the Wrong Places

A dear friend of mine sent me this quote from G. K. Chesterton concerning what he calls the “dislocation of humility.”

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason . . . We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.” (Orthodoxy, p. 31f.)