Christian Self-Mastery Quotes

“How often, again, a person looks forward to some great event that will change the whole environment and interest of his life. A person anticipating such an event looks forward and plans and considers. He asks himself what effect this will produce upon his character: Will he be better or worse for it? Will it make him stronger or weaker? Will it draw out the spirit of sympathy or of antagonism? He imagines himself — and he has, perhaps, a very vivid imagination — in his new surroundings; he lives in them and brings all possible contingencies to bear upon himself that he may as much as possible gauge and measure himself so that he may not be taken unawares. At last the event so long anticipated comes to pass, and all the forecasts prove to be utterly wrong. The effect upon him is different altogether either from what he hoped it might be or feared it would be. The man placed in the setting of circumstances different from those which he had long been used to finds that he is utterly unlike what he had imagined himself to be. His hopes and fears were alike miscalculations. He had planned that the same man as had known himself to be should be in these new surroundings. There was to him, as he looked forward to the change, only one uncertain quantity, and that was the new material or moral or religious world in which he was to find himself. As to these, he had made no mistake; the mistake lay in supposing that he knew the person who was to be placed amid these circumstances. There he was completely mistaken. No sooner did the change take place than he found that he no longer knew the man. He was amazed to find himself wholly different from what he had imagined himself to be. New faults came to light; new virtues sprang to his defense; old temptations came to life in the new soil, and he found that the mere change of external things shows him to be altogether a different person from what he had thought.”
― Basil W. Maturin, Christian Self-Mastery