William Law on Humility

Be humble, if thou would'st attain to Wisdom.

Be humbler still, when Wisdom thou hast mastered

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence, 2, 161-162)

William Law (1686 –  1761) was an Anglican priest who left the priesthood because he was too much of a lover of free, open, honest inquiry. Around 1735, he discovered the works of the great Christian Theosophist Jacob Boehme and spent the rest of his life exploring aspects of this type of mysticism, including an 1855 work entitled An Introduction to Theosophy.  Aldous Huxley,  in  'The Perennial Philosophy' (1946) quotes Law generously when using Christian examples in his themes of comparative religion.

For the fuller of pride any one is himself, the more impatient will he be at the smallest instances of it in other people. And the less humility any one has in his own mind, the more will he demand and be delighted with it in other people.

You must therefore act by a quite contrary measure, and reckon yourself only so far humble, as you impose every instance of humility upon yourself, and never call for it in other people, so far an enemy to pride, as you never spare it in yourself, nor ever censure it in other persons.

Now, in order to do this, you need only consider that pride and humility signify nothing to you, but so far as they are your own; that they do you neither good nor harm, but as they are the tempers of your own heart.

The loving, therefore, of humility, is of no benefit or advantage to you, but so far as you love to see all your own thoughts, words, and actions, governed by it. And the hating of pride does you no good, is no perfection in you, but so far as you hate to harbour any degree of it in your own heart.

Now in order to begin, and set out well, in the practice of humility, you must take it for granted that you are proud, that you have all your life been more or less infected with this unreasonable temper.

You should believe also, that it is your greatest weakness, that your heart is most subject to it, that it is so constantly stealing upon you, that you have reason to watch and suspect its approaches in all your actions.

For this is what most people, especially new beginners in a pious life, may with great truth think of themselves.

For there is no one vice that is more deeply rooted in our nature, or that receives such constant nourishment from almost everything that we think or do: there being hardly anything in the world that we want or use, or any action or duty of life, but pride finds some means or other to take hold of it. So that at what time soever we begin to offer ourselves to God, we can hardly be surer of anything, than that we have a great deal of pride to repent of.

If, therefore, you find it disagreeable to your mind to entertain this opinion of yourself, and that you cannot put yourself amongst those that want to be cured of pride, you may be as sure as if an angel from heaven had told you, that you have not only much, but all your humility to seek.

For you can have no greater sign of a more confirmed pride, than when you think that you are humble enough. He that thinks he loves God enough, shows himself to be an entire stranger to that holy passion; so he that thinks he has humility enough, shows that he is not so much as a beginner in the practice of true humility. 

(Law, William. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 1729, Ch. 16)