he good God, serenely blessed,
should suffer pain to torment His child! How the heavenly powers can
bear to look upon it, to hear all the moans of anguish, to see all the
wrestlings of pain which each moment distract and waste the beings whom
they love! For much of the pain of life man himself is, directly and in
the first instance, responsible. He makes it, in spite of God, by his
insane folly, passion, or lust. But how much lies at the door of the
heavenly Ruler, is His word, His ordinance, the discipline which He
presses sternly on His child! Pain, that torments and maddens him while
he works; pain that pierces him from everything that he touches,
everything that he delights in, every being that he loves; pain, that
searches the roots of his courage and endurance, which makes the marrow
quiver in his bones, the blood curdle in his heart; pain, which rings
from a man who is the very type of endurance the most bitter curses, the
most fierce anathemas on the very sunlight which shines on him, on birth
and all its agony, on life and all its intolerable woe. "_In sorrow
shalt thou bring forth children_," and everything which is freighted
with any portion of thy life. Pain in birth; tears in the eyes of
helpless infants on their mother's bosom; the paths of the wilderness
wet with the tears of brave men and women wrestling with pain too sharp
for endurance; tears rung out from the glazing eye, when it settles for
one painless moment into the fixed, cold stare of death!

3. Care. "_Dust thou art._" Here lies the secret of care. I believe that
these words suggest altogether the most bitter and miserable experience
of mankind. Toil may be borne, pain may be borne; but who in his own
strength can wrestle with and master care? Man's condition is that of
the most dependent of beings, while the things which he needs for the
satisfaction of his nature refuse to recognise the mastery of his hand.
He comes into the world the most helpless of all the infants of
creation. It is horrible to imagine what a human infant, in the hands of
a careless or cruel parent, may be made to endure. And this condition of
his infancy follows him through life: he is really an infant, a
nursling, as dependent for the daily bread of body, mind, and spirit on
supplies which he cannot command, as an infant at the mother's breast.
So large is the range of his necessities, so infinite his wants, that he
needs just the arm and the treasure of the Omnipotent to