The struggle against the flesh is the hard effort required to master one’s instincts and thus gain that self-control which distinguishes human beings at their best and highest from the animal creation.

And all the time there has to be the resistance against the subtle and varied manoeuvres of the Devil who never rests in his endeavours to draw us away from God and from all that is godly, by concentrating our attention on ourselves and on what we want or think we should have.

So long as we are prompted and led, either consciously or unconsciously, by such things we are not free beings. For we become masters of ourselves, not when we are for ever turned this way and that by the “storms of passion, the murmurs of self-will” (1), but when we are steering a straight course because God’s restraining and guiding hand is on the tiller of our life.