A popular work of fiction lately published shows incidentally how great conceptions may grow in a foreign and incongenial soil. It treats of the times of Nero and the early struggles of the Christians in Rome. Amidst that folly, profligacy, debauchery, strife, and cruelty, the Christian purity, humility, brotherly love, and faith in God are made to stand forth in world-wide contrast. Through a series of dramatic events, possessing for him a powerful interest, a Roman patrician comes to receive the Christian ideas, and, under the nurture of interest, they gradually wax strong and become the dominant impulses of his being. A fellow patrician, maintaining a persistent attitude of indifference to the new truths, lives and dies, to the last a degenerate Roman and a Stoic.
A remote interest whose attainment is doubtful may come to wholly possess the mind. A young man, misunderstood and underestimated by friends, suffering years of unrequited effort, persevering in silent determination, standing for the right, making friends with all classes, seizing strongly the given opportunity, defying popularity, and thereby winning it, may gradually rise to prominence through long years of focusing of effort.
Man's free will makes him responsible for his interests. Aristotle's dictum comes down to us in an unbroken line of royal descent: Learn to find interest in right things. Repugnance to the sternest demands of duty may be converted into liking, and, in the process, character is made. If you have a need for mathematics, science, history, poetry, or philanthropy, cultivate it, and interest will come as a benediction upon the effort. I sometimes think
