Of course, a man has to decide for himself.  If he does not desire leisure, if he finds it wearisome and mischievous, he had better not cultivate it; if his conscience tells him that he must go on with a particular work, he had better simply obey the command.  But it is very easy to educate a false conscience in these matters by mere habit; and if you play tricks with your mind or your conscience habitually, it has an ugly habit of ending by playing tricks upon you, like the Old Man of the Sea.  The false conscience is satisfied and the real conscience drugged, if a person with a sense of duty to others fills up his time with unnecessary letters and useless interviews; worse still if he goes about proclaiming with complacent pride that his work gives him no time to read or think.  If he has any responsibility in the matter, if it is his business to help or direct others, he ought to be sure that he has something to give them beyond platitudes which he has not tested.  In the story of Mary and Martha, which is a very mysterious one, it is quite clear that Martha was rebuked, not for being hospitable, but for being fussy; but it is not at all clear what Mary was praised for—­certainly not for being useful.  She was not praised for visiting the sick, or for attending committees, but apparently for doing nothing—­for sitting still, for listening to talk, and for being interested.  Presumably both were sympathetic, and Martha showed it by practical kindness, and attention to the knives and the plates.  But what was the one thing needful?  What was the good part, which Mary had chosen, and which would not be taken from her?  The truth is that there is very little said about active work in the Gospel.  It is, indeed, rather made fun of, if one may use such an expression.  There is a great deal about simple kindness and neighbourliness, but nothing about making money, or social organisation.  In a poor village community the problem was no doubt an easier one; but in our more complicated civilisation it is not so easy to see how to act.  Suppose that I am seized with a sudden impulse of benevolence, what am I to do?  In the old storybooks one took a portion of one’s dinner to a sick person, or went to read aloud to some one.  But it is not so easy to find the right people.  If I set off here on a round with a slop-basin containing apple fritters, my intrusion would be generally and rightly resented; and as for being read aloud to or visited when I am ill, there is nothing I should personally dislike more than a succession of visitors bent on benevolence.  I might put up with it if I felt that it sprung from a genuine affection, but if I felt it was done from a sense of duty, it would be an intolerable addition to my troubles.  Many people in grief and trouble only desire not to be interfered with, and to be left alone, and when they want sympathy they know how and where to ask for it.  Personally I do not want sympathy at all if I am in trouble, because it only makes me suffer more; the real comfort under such circumstances is when people behave quite naturally, as if there were no troubles in the world; then one has to try to behave decently, and that is one’s best chance of forgetting oneself.