pride

excerpt from William Wilberforce's 'Real Christianity'

"We can test the teaching about the natural depravity of man most rigidly by asking the watchful, self-denying Christian to decide the controversy…Go with him into your closet. Ask him his opinion of the corruption of the heart. He will tell you that he is deeply aware of its power, having learned about its strength from self-observation and long acquaintance with the workings of his own mind. He will tell you that every day reinforces this conviction. Indeed, even hourly he sees evidence to deplore his lack of simplicity of intention, his weakness of purpose, his low views, his selfish, unworthy desires, his backwardness in duty, his dullness and coldness in performing it.
The watchful Christian finds he is continually forced to confess that he feels within himself two opposite principles, and that 'he cannot do the things that he would' (Rom 7:19). In the language of Puritan Richard Hooker, 'the little fruit we have in holiness, it is, God knoweth, corrupt and unsound. We put no confidence at all in it. We challenge nothing in the world for it. We dare not call God to reckoning, as if we had Him in our debt-books. Our continual suit to Him is, and must be, to bear with our infirmities, and pardon our offences.' Such is the moral history and condition of man."