At twenty years old, in London in 1925, Neville stayed with his friend Matthew Bentley, whose father -- a retired mining engineer then fifty-eight, the same age Neville was when giving this lecture -- lived quietly with his wife in a small home in Hammersmith and took a philosophical approach to life. When Neville urged Matt to take an interest in his father's outlook, Matt answered that he wanted to 'live first' and make his fortune before anything else. Neville uses the exchange as his example of the parable of the sower's seed choked by thorns -- the cares of the world and the desire for riches smothering what a person has heard.