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Lord Macaulay has remarked that there are some unhappy men constitutionally prone to the darker passions, men to whom bitter words are as natural as snarling and biting to a ferocious dog; and he asserts that to come into the world with this wretched mental disease is a greater calamity than to be born blind or deaf. A man, he proceeds to say, who, having such a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains himself to behave habitually with justice and humanity towards those who are in his power, seems worthy of the highest admiration. "There have been instances of this self command; and they are among the most signal triumphs of philosophy and religion." In eulogies of the Emperor this characteristic is not to be slighted, that he was "a master of the angry passions, which rage with such destructive violence in the breast of a despot." Of Mohammed we are told that he was naturally irritable, but had brought his temper under great control, so that even in the self-indulgent intercourse of domestic life he was kind and tolerant. "I served him from the time I was eight years old," said his servant Anus, "and he never scolded me for anything, though things were spoilt by me." Adam Smith traces from school and playground the progress and, so to speak, natural history of self-control, and shows on what grounds, and in what way, the child advances in self-command, studies to be more and more master of itself, and tries to exercise over its own feelings "a discipline which the practice of the longest life is very seldom sufficient to bring to complete perfection."

(W. Arnot, D.D.)

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KJV: He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.

WEB: He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a quick temper displays folly.