[Dark Saint Alaick]

Mary did take the better part, for she laid hold on the things which
are spiritual. Mary had learned the great truth that it is not the
house you live in or the food you eat, or the clothes you wear that
make you rich, but it is the thoughts you think. Christ put it well
when he said, "Mary hath chosen the better part." Life is a choice
every day. Every day we choose between the best and the second best,
if we are choosing wisely. It is not generally a choice between good
and bad--that is too easy. The choice in life is more subtle than
that, and not so easily decided. The good is the greatest rival of the
best.

Sometimes we would like to take both the best and the second best, but
that is not according to the rules of the game. You take your choice
and leave the rest. Every gain in life means a corresponding loss;
development in one part means a shrinkage in some other. Wild wheat is
small and hard, quite capable of looking after itself, but its heads
contain only a few small kernels. Cultivated wheat has lost its
hardiness and its self-reliance, but its heads are filled with large
kernels which feed the nation. There has been a great gain in
usefulness, by cultivation, with a corresponding loss in hardiness.
When riches are increased, so also are anxieties and cares. Life is
full of compensation.

So we ask, in all seriousness, and in no spirit of flippancy: "Should
women think?" They gain in power perhaps, but do they not lose in
happiness by thinking? If women must always labor under unjust
economic conditions, receiving less pay for the same work than men, if
women must always submit to the unjust social laws, based on the
barbaric mosaic decree that the woman is to be stoned, and the man
allowed to go free; if women must always see the children they have
brought into the world with infinite pain and weariness, taken away
from them to fight man-made battles over which no woman has any power;
if women must always see their sons degraded by man-made legislation
and man-protected evils--then I ask, Is it not a great mistake for
women to think?

The Martha women, who fill their hands with labor and find their
highest delights in the day's work, are the happiest. That is, if
these things must always be, if we must always beat upon the bars of
the cage--we are foolish to beat; it is hard on the hands! Far better
for us to stop looking out and sit down and say: "Good old cage--I
always did like a cage, anyway!"

But the question of whether or not women should think was settled long
ago. We must think because we were given something to think with, ages
ago, at the time of our creation. If God had not intended us to think,
he would not have given us our intelligence. It would be a shabby
trick, too, to give women brains to think, with no hope of results, for
thinking is just an aggravation if nothing comes of it. It is a law of
life that people will use what they have. That is one theory of what
caused the war. The nations were "so good and ready," they just
naturally fought. Mental activity is just as natural for the woman
peeling potatoes as it is for the man behind the plow, and a little
thinking will not hurt the quality of the work in either case. There
is in western Canada, one woman at least, who combines thinking and
working to great advantage. Her kitchen walls are hung with mottoes
and poems, which she commits to memory as she works, and so while her
hands are busy, she feeds her soul with the bread of life.