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Updated: May 19, 2025
It would be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that because people are excitable they must always be in a state of excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling is the instrument and element of strong self-control: but it requires to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-conquest.
Stoicism teaches men to venerate and obey natural law; to accept with proud equanimity the misfortunes of life; to be beneficent, but to inhibit the emotion of pity; to be self-reliant and self-contained; to practise self-denial for the sake of self-conquest; and to regard this life as a stern school of moral discipline.
And the whole moral idealism of the race seems to me to have been imaged in that marvellous Buddha of Kamakura, whose countenance, 'calm like a deep, still water' expresses, as perhaps no other work of human hands can have expressed, the eternal truth: 'There is no higher happiness than rest. It is toward that infinite calm that the aspirations of the Orient have been turned; and the ideal of the Supreme Self-Conquest it has made its own.
He found the steps to the higher consciousness and its power only through slow self-conquest and comradeship with pain, and this was the inheritance he handed down through the centuries. To think in terms of mystical wisdom meant human denial of all sentient life. Unification was bought through total consecration to the subjective and the absolute, in which the diverse could have no part.
But the modes of suffering from the evil, and the separate modes of suffering from the effort of self-conquest, together with errors of judgment incident to such states of transitional torment, are all nearly allied, practically analogous as regards the remedies, even if characteristically distinguished to the inner consciousness.
To think is to withdraw, as it were, into one's impression to make it clear to one's self, and then to put it forth in the shape of a personal judgment. In this also consists self-deliverance, self-enfranchisement, self-conquest. All that comes from outside is a question to which we owe an answer a pressure to be met by counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and living agents.
But now just think what it would mean to us if we really knew that this humble, loving man were the Creator of the universe the very God who took upon Himself our human nature with all its hereditary imperfections; and, in that human nature met and conquered every temptation that ever was, or ever could be possible to man; thus by self-conquest receiving all the divine qualities into his human nature, and bringing them into this world within reach of the hearts and minds of all men, to give light and warmth to their lives, and to enable them to serve each other; if we could take this view of the man's life and work, with what quiet reverence and joy should we celebrate the twenty-fifth of December as a day set apart to celebrate His birth into the world!
He is taught early that from him endurance is expected; the self-conquest of restrained emotion is his constant lesson. If it be a girl who suffers, she is assumed to be weak, and it is felt that for her tears are natural and not to be sternly repressed; nor are her little aches and complaints dismissed as lightly as are her brother's.
The rare natures which are in truth ruled by the instinct of renunciation, which find in the mortification of sense a spring of unearthly joy brimming higher with each self-conquest, may experience temptation and relapse, but the former is a new occasion for the arming of the spirit, and the latter speedily leads to a remorse which is the strongest of all incentives to ascetic struggle.
And the especial theme she selected was the grace and beauty of Lady Castleton! A pressing invitation to spend some days at the castle had been cordially given to all. It was accepted only by myself: I wrote word that I would come. Yes, I longed to prove the strength of my own self-conquest, and accurately test the nature of the feelings that had disturbed me.
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