Dangerous Prayer

"Lord, cut;
Lord, carve;
Lord, wound;
Lord, do anything that
may perfect Thy Father's
image in us and make us
meet for glory."

-Samuel Rutherford

It can't be both ways.

The sage G. K. Chesterton exposes a strange contradiction in our culture.

"People of the progressive sort are perpetually telling us that the hope of the world is in education. Education is everything. Nothing is more important as training the rising generation.
        They tell us this over and over again, with slight variations of the same formula, and never seem to see what it involves. For if there be any word of truth in all this talk about the education of the child, then there is certainly nothing but nonsense in nine-tenths of the talk about the emancipation of the woman. 
If education is the highest function in the State, why should anybody want to be emancipated from the highest function in the State? It is as if we talked of commuting the sentence that condemned a man to be President of the United States; or a reprieve coming in time to save him from being Pope. If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world? It is as if we were to rescue her from the cruel doom of being a poet like Shakespeare; or to pity the limitations of an all-round artist like Leonardo da Vinci. 
      In short, if education is really the larger matter, then certainly domestic life is the larger matter; and official or commercial life the lesser matter. It is a mere matter of arithmetic that anything taken from the larger matter will leave it less. It is a mere matter of simple subtraction that the mother must have less time for the family if she has more time for the factory.

             Make up your mind whether you want unlimited education or unlimited emancipation, but do not be such a fool as to suppose you can have both at once."