Precept & Practice – JANUARY 27 – Inhibition

Inhibition, or self-control, plays an enormous part in the progress and development of the race.   You may say that man ascends in proportion to the extent to which he has cultivated inhibition, his power of checking all that interferes with his advancement, and stimulating all that fosters it.   We are taught by our Lord to pray  ‘Lead us not into temptation.’   We may couch it in another form, ‘Increase our mental resistiveness.’   Every time we resist successfully what is hurtful, we are strengthening our chance of becoming more of a real man or woman.   (For it is a mark of real manhood to have at command the power to inhibit or control all the impulses of our nature and all the appeals to it from outside.   This is the secret of the use of forming good habits.   The value of repetition is well known.   It is by doing the same act over and over again that we form a habit.   But when we go deeper, we find that there is a definite physical process corresponding…..   Similarly for want of due inhibition a bad habit may grow up, which it is equally difficult to dispel…..   But inhibit unkindness, you will always be kind.   Control your desires, you will never be brutish.   Sometimes so small a supply of the power of inhibition has been cultivated in youth that it takes very little to exhaust it later on.   And so, the power of inhibiting impulses, that are disagreeable or coarse or immoral, is often paralysed by any exhaustion of nerve force.   That is why people more often give offence or yield to emotion when they are over-wrought.   If they kept in retirement until they had recuperated, they would avoid such undesirable displays….. /ctd

The Reverend T. W. M. Lund

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From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW