(3) Discretion is sometimes the better part of valor.  Besides strengthening our own wills, it is wise to seek in every way to remove temptation from our path, and, if need be, to run away from it.  We must keep away from situations that experience warns are dangerous for us, however innocent they may be to others.  If a man find that dancing, or the theater, arouses his passionate nature, it may be better to avoid it entirely till his hypersensitive state is normalized.  Always alcoholic liquors are to be avoided; they cloud the reason and the will, and let impulse loose.  Always overexcitement and overfatigue are to be avoided.  “The power to overcome temptation,” Jane Addams writes, “reaches its limit almost automatically with that of physical resistance.”

(4) We must follow Bossuet’s advice not to combat passions directly so much as to turn them aside by applying them to other objects.  Our emotional nature is a gift of the gods; the sinner might have been a saint if his emotions had only been enlisted under the right banner.  Something good to love, to work for, and think about, something that can arouse our whole nature and relieve it from suppression, is the best antidote to morbid desire.  It is sometimes alleged that it is better to satisfy a passion than to keep it pent up within the organism.  But satisfying a wrong passion not only brings its inevitable unhappy consequences, to one’s self and to others, it makes it far harder to resist the passion again, when it recurs.  The only safe outlet is one that leads into right conduct; under skilful guidance all passions can be transmuted into valuable driving forces and allies of morality.

(5) Even if one seems to be playing a losing game, one can still keep up the fight.  One can spoil one’s enjoyment in self-indulgence or selfishness; one can refuse to give in all over.  This minority representation of the better impulse will suffice to keep it alive in us; and when the revulsion from sin comes we shall be in better shape to make the fight next time.  A hundred failures need not discourage; some of the greatest men have gained the final ascendancy over their weaknesses only after a long and often losing struggle.  The case is hopeless only for the man who stops fighting.

Self-control is the measure of manhood.  It is the most important thing in the personal life.  And it is within the reach of any man who can be brought to understand the mechanism where through it can be attained.  It remains true that it is best attained through religion, which utilizes the power of prayer, of faith, the enthusiasm of a great cause and motive, and the comradeship and help of others engaged in the same eternal war with sin.  But religion, to be efficacious, must be not passively accepted, but used. Its help comes not to him who saith “Lord, Lord!” but to him who earnestly seeks to do the will of the Father.  J. Payot, Education of the Will.  H. C. King, Rational Living, chap.  VI, sec.