Precept & Practice – JANUARY 28 – Inhibition (continued)

…..You may find people angels or demons, as they are fresh or tired.   We are all wise to withdraw from society when we are exhausted, just on this account.   Break-down, one of the neurotic troubles of the time, means that we have used up our surplus stock of brain inhibition.   The highest sanity is that where the most perfect mental inhibition exists…..   For after all, is it not clear that inhibition, the power within us to control our own acts, impulses, passions, is the basis of all law, and the cement of every social system, without which Society must go to pieces…..   The daily habit of doing the good thing and avoiding the bad writes itself on the brain-cells and becomes a permanent record there, reacting beneficially on the entire man.   We grow to look on self-denial, justice, kindness, purity, sincerity, as things at all costs to be imitated, and on meanness, untruth, jealousy, anger, injustice, foulness, as things to be avoided.   I want you to feel that our spiritual nature is not something in the clouds, vain, intangible, beyond reach, which may or may not be the mere sport of the scoffer, the fantastic toy of the moralist.   It has its seat actually in our bodies so that we can put our finger upon it and say, ‘it is there.’   God has, in the evolution of time, allowed wise patient searchers to understand it, and submit its wonders to our gaze.   Inhibition is the bridling of natural impulses to curb their imperiousness and save us from becoming their slaves.

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