humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from ... 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."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, Doubleday and Company, 1959, orig. 1924), p31 quoted in John Piper, Future Grace, (IVP: 1995) p88