II THE DANGER-POINT, THE UN TRAINED WILL N the parable of the Two Sons our Lord IN made a diagnosis of the most fatal disease in human character, and pronounced it to be an impairment of the Will. The father had commanded-"Go work to-day in my vineyard." The younger son replied, "I go, sir," but he went not. This was doubtless a wellmeaning fellow, honest at the moment; but something diverted him from his purpose. Perhaps the fish were breaking, and the rippling circles on the pools fascinated him as the baited lure beneath the water caught the eyes of his victims; a fox had been tracked to his hole under the rocks in yonder copse, and the baying of the hounds was enchanting music; a strolling storyteller, the novelist of that bookless period, was holding a gaping crowd in the village; it was market-day in the adjacent town, and the fields outside the walls by the gates were spread with bright rugs, covered with attractive wares, and tended by gay-dressed vendors from various tribes; a Roman centurion had camped his company on the hillside; or, perhaps, it was none of these, the youth having only been seized with a more rigid feeling of his own chronic laziness. Whatever the occasion which makes it apparent, the most common weakness in character is an unassertive Will, a lack of volitional initiative. This is not necessarily associated with intellectual weakness or the absence of high moral sentiment. Men and women who are rarely endowed by nature in other respects afford our saddest illustrations. The mother of the visionary Prince of Orléans-regent during the minority of Louis XV., patron of the "Law Bubble" and other vicious schemes to which he fell an easy victim―said of her son, "The fairies were invited to the birth of my boy and each endowed him with some happy quality. But one wicked fairy, who had been forgotten in the invitations, came leaning upon her stick, and, not being able to annul her sisters' gifts to the newborn child, declared that the prince should never know how to make use of any of them." The "wicked fairy" would seem to be as ubiquitous as the multitude of her better disposed sisters. The Will is like a dynamo. When the armature spins rapidly close to the magnetic field the mechanical power which drives it-steam or water -is changed to electric power. It is no longer confined to the factory, but conducted through wires to do its work miles away, lighting the city |