THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3277, 3 January 1917, Page 49

THE WEEK.

With this week we enter up n a new year, with all its unknown happenings still waiting in the dimness of the future, and as wo step over its threshold we instinctively cast a glance had; at the year up are leaving behind. There is not very much to see there except the one thing that dominates all our lives at present, for over all the world still falls the shadow of the war. And it is a very stationary shadow. Nothing very much seems _to happen on either side to bring the thing to an end. But then a siege is always a long business, and that is what it has all settled down to —a siege not of a city, but of half Europe by a good deal of the rest of the world. All the events of the war, however they may engross cur attention' at the time, are only incidents in the whole business—Yerdnn. the Somme, the Rumanian advance and retreat, the continual disturbances in Oreece, which is in the position of a family camped at tha back of the investing lines, part of them favouring the besieged and part the besiegers, and when they are not lending a hand to the respective sides they favour they have a go at each other. Germany of course denies that the Central Powers are in the position of a besieged fortress, which only confirm* us in our opinion that

such is the case. If Germany now was to say that black was black \vc should immediately begin to think it was white. Hence we hail her peace suggestions with joy, for wo don't believe a word about her sorrow at the suffering of humanity and all that—does one gather grapes from thorns or figs from tin.-tie.-V—and we know therefore that the real reason can only bo a sense of failing strength and a desire to make the best bargain she can on the present situation. She does not seem, to realise that she is not to be allowed to bargain with ill-gotten gains, and as shehas nothing to bargain with except what she has taken from someone else there can be no bargaining at all, only restitution. Our answer to her is the entire reconstruction of the British Government in a manner that throws precedent to the winds, and its reappearance as a Government formed with a single object in view —the winning of the war. Incidentally it will accomplish a great many other things—things that were some people's Utopian dreams a year or two ago. I hope you read Mr Lloyd George's speech to the* House of Commons, as well as the cable message sent to New Zealand. You will see there what England is setting about, to do. and what we will have to be doing our.-elves very shortly. We have not felt the strain so much as England, SO that we have not seen the immediate necessity for such measures as yet, but the time will come. Mr If. G. Wells and others must be rubbing their eyes as they see how the things thev had looked forward to in a far future are actually coming to pass—the nationalisation of essential industries, a conscription of labour by which everyone will do his or her share in the work of the nation, the growth of the idea that it is a crime to make private profit out of the needs of the community', and so on, and all these ideas, though they may be considered war expedients, are bound to continue to a great extent even after it is over. ° By the way, I came across a quaint reference to oiie or two English politicians in the "Martha and Mary" book of which I told you last week. Mr Graham is saying that although the English nation has lately been tending more to the "Mary" way of thinking than used to be the case, its representative men are still of the other typo. "Mr Lloyd George with his care for the poor is a Martha," he says. "Mr Bonar Law is a Martha also. H. G. Wells, with his World set Free, and his rooms with rounded instead of squared corners to help the. women to sweep, is a Martha." Can't you just see them in a flash of imagination, these eminent men in mob-cap and pinafore in Martha-like fashion, working away at cleaning up the world?' And all good-will go with them, say I ! The way of Mary may be very beautiful, and certainly we cannot do without it altogether, but seeing this _ is _ a material world and we are living in it, I do not see whv we should not try to make the best of'it. We know quite web from many incidents in the Gospels—little homelv incidents like the preparation of a, meal for the disciples after their night s fishing—that Christ Himself did not despise the common needs of humanity Martha's mistake lay in thinking over-, much of these things at a time when there was a golden opportunity of learning about higher things. Similarly, Mary would make a mistake if ebe kept the "good part" to herself, and, concerned only with the welfare of her own soul, did' not pass on what she had learnt to others. 'The busy way may lead to materialism, the way of prayer and contemplation to a sort of spiritual selfishness: It will be all right if we remember that the two ways should always be drawing nearer together, not farther and farther apart. The frontispiece to Mr Graham's book is a picture taken from a large panel in the Convent of Martha and Mary in Moscow, a new convent of which a Russian Grand Duchess, the foundress, is Abbess. The picture shews two figures, very different in appearance, but standing very close together. Martha, in a brilliantly-coloured robe, represents the church in the world, the church militant, with banners and vestments and pageantry; Mary, in the background, in dark-coloured garments, represents the church contemplative, the ascetic life Both are different aspects of the same thing. I have been thinking much of this Martha and Mary idea, for it seems to me a very beautiful one, and one that we do well to keep in mind just now, for we need prayer, since we are fighting a spiritual evil, and work to help on the physical effort required of the nation. We need to have in us, each one of uSj something of Martha and something of -Mary., and, indeed, that is so with most of us, for, as Mr Graham says at the end of one of his chapters, it is quite impossible to classify people rigidly into one type or the other. "So it would be wrong," he concludes, and I should like you to ponder over these last few lines during the new year, "to say that all who were in the way of Martha were in towns working for the poor, or that all in the way of Mary were away in the desert saving their souls at the feet of the

Master, or-that the priests in their orders and vestments with their processions and grandeur were all in the way of Martha, or that the hermits of the desert did not upon occasion comic like Paphnutius into the city of Alexandria to save Thais, the dancing girl. The sisters love one another; and though it is not written in the Gospels, there were certainly occassions when Mary might have been seen cumbered about with many things whilst Martha sat with her Lord." ELIZABETH.