I “make up” my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.” All men can say with Robert Browning’s Paracelsus: “I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.” “Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” Tito, in George Eliot’s Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson’s story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.” By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel. “Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.” By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may “_make level in the desert a highway for our God_” (_Is. 40:3_), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to “_the word of the kingdom_” (_Mat. 13:19_).