A Worthwhile Quotation

Given me by a friend from a blog I don't personally visit (no animus, just indicating that I haven't seen this at the location sited below).

Notable and Quotable (II)
Posted by Kendall Harmon

...Sustained discussion of the human propensity towards self-deception has all but disappeared from twentieth-century analyses of the spiritual life. There are, of course, still specialists in philosophy and psychology working out the details. But, for most of us, self-deception simply doesn't jump immediately to mind as an explanation of our experience. We rarely think of it. Lots of people I talk to have never so much as considered the possibility that they've fallen prey to it in any significant way. One is reminded here of the haunting suggestion in Bishop Butler's tenth sermon that "those who have never had any suspicion of, who have never made allowances for this weakness in themselves, who have never (if I may be allowed such a manner of speaking) caught themselves in it, may almost take it for granted that they have been very much misled by it."

-- Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: The Role of Self-deception in Christian Living
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p, 7