happiness and delight, and my best happiness is found in servin' them I
love. But I must tell the truth, in the house or outdoors."

Sez he faintly, "The Old Testament may teach that women have some strength
and power. But in the New Testament in every great undertaken' and plan men
have been chosen by God to carry them through."

"Why-ee!" sez I, "how you talk! Have you ever read the Bible?"

He said evasively, his grandmother owned one, and he had seen it in early
youth. And then he went on in a sort of apologizin' way. He had always
meant to read it, but he had entered political life at an early age where
the Bible wuzn't popular, and he believed that he had never read further
than the Epistles of Gulliver to the Liliputians.

Sez I, "That hain't Bible, there hain't no Gulliver in it, and you mean
Galatians."

Well, he said, that might be it, it wuz some man he knew, and he had always
heard and believed that man wuz the only worker that God had chosen.

"Why," sez I, "the one great theme of the New Testament--the salvation of
the world through the birth of Christ--no man had anything to do with. Our
divine Lord wuz born of God and Woman. Heavenly plan of redemption for
fallen humanity. God Himself called woman into that work, the divine work
of saving a world, and why shouldn't she continue in it? God called her.
Mary had no dream of publicity, no desire of a world's work of suffering
and renunciation. The soft air of Galilee wropped her about in its sweet
content, as she dreamed her quiet dreams in maiden peace--dreamed, perhaps,
of domestic love and happiness.