C.S. Lewis comments on the dangers of spiritual pride:
“One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great thelogian; one might so easily mistake it for being a good Christian. The temptations to which a great philologist or a great chemist is exposed are trivial in comparison. When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don’t know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God’s eyes; as the priests said (John 7, 49), ‘All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accursed.’ And as this pride increases, the ‘subject’ or study which confers such privilege will grow more and more complicated, the list of things forbidden will increase, till to get through a single day without supposed sin becomes like an elaborate step-dance, and this horrible network breeds self-righteousness in some and haunting anxiety in others. Meanwhile the ‘weightier matters of the Law’, righteousness itself, shrinks into insignificance under this vast overgrowth, so that the legalists strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.” [emphasis mine]
Funny you should cite this, it reads like a brief synopsis of Protestant Reformer objections to the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century.