I have always considered myself somewhat conservative or old-fashioned when it comes to embracing a highly prescriptive moralist approach to grounding and guiding my life, and how much I appreciate this passage from T.H. Green’s lecture “On the different senses of ‘Freedom’ as applied to will and to the moral progress of man” reminds me of this:
The self-realising principle… must overcome the ‘natural impulses’, not in the sense of either extinguishing them or denying them an object, but in the sense of fusing them with those of higher interests, which have human perfection in some of its forms for their object. Some approach to this fusion we may notice in all good men; not merely in those in whom all natural passions, love, anger, pride, ambition, are enlisted in the service of great public cause, but in those with whom such passions are all governed by some such commonplace idea as that of educating a family.
Samuel Rutherford 