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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and
finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt
with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and
rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies with the weapons
of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were
turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of
himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the
cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes and so forth, were
probably no more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as
now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price.
If he chose to sell himself to this patron and to that, he was used
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