conflicts left, to keep up the habits of self-control and watchfulness.
Indeed, the avoidance which I recommend to you involves in itself the
necessity of so much vigilance, that it will help to prepare you for
measures of more active resistance. On this principle, then, you will
shrink from every species of discussion, on either practical or abstract
subjects, which is likely to excite you beyond control, and disable you
from bearing with gentleness and calmness the triumph, either real or
imaginary, of your opponent. The time will come, I trust, when no
subject need be forbidden to you on these grounds, but at present you
must submit to an invalid regimen, and shun every thing that has even a
tendency to excitement.

This system of avoidance is of the more importance, because every time
your ill-temper acquires the mastery over you, its strength is tenfold
increased for the next conflict, at the same time that your hopes of the
power of resistance, afforded either by your own will or by the
assisting grace of God, are of course weakened. You find, at each fall
before the power of sin, a greater difficulty in exercising faith in
either human or divine means of improvement. You do not, indeed, doubt
the power of God, but a disbelief steals over you which has equally
fatal tendencies. You allow yourself to indulge vague doubts of his
willingness to help you, or a suspicion insinuates itself that the God
whom you so anxiously try to please would not allow you to fall so
constantly into error, if this error were of a very heinous nature. You
should be careful to shun any course of conduct possibly suggestive of
such dangerous doubts. You should seek to establish in your mind the
habitual conviction that, victory being placed by God within your reach,
you must conquer or perish! None but those who by obedience prove
themselves children of God, shall inherit the kingdom prepared for them
from the foundation of the world.[32]