went forth with a great sorrow in his
heart, and a great shadow over his life, into the hard stern wilderness.
There he had not to _dress and to keep_ a garden, but to make one, and
that is altogether higher and nobler work. A higher range of faculties
was at once called into action. He had to create fruitful fields and
homesteads, and to frame a new paradise in imagination, which his
strenuous toil, pain, and care were to realize in time. His creative
work as a husbandman is symbolic of all his creation, his work as
parent, thinker, artist, poet, and master of the world. In Eden
everything was made for him, and was ready to his hand; in the world he
had to make, or at any rate to mould, everything, and to make his hand
ready for an infinite variety of work. And what does this constructive
creative toil imply? It means that he had to discover, to think out, and
to reproduce, by the utmost strain his faculties would bear, the
thoughts of God. He had to study nature, and to master her methods; he
had to discover the uses of his powers and the possibilities of his
life. He rose at once sad and stricken, but grand through the gentleness
which had made him great, to the fulness of a godlike stature; and what
are toil, and pain, and care, through life's brief day, if they lift man
up to this excellent glory of his manhood, the power to think, to work,
to create, in the track and after the method of God?

2. By toil, and pain, and care, man becomes acquainted with the
experience of a father; the deepest and noblest relationships unfold to
him their significance, and unutterably enrich and exalt his life.

Travail is the symbolic pain. "_In sorrow shalt thou bring forth
children_;" and in sorrow all the products of the higher life are born.
The question is very simple. Ask a woman, when the cry of her first-born
sounds in her ear, and its cheek nestles on her breast, how far the joy
transcends the pain. She can only murmur--"Unspeakably," and clasp her
nursling closer to her heart. How much the pain enters into and exalts
the joy, who shall tell? Ask the man, a man like poor Palissy, or the
blind bard who got L10 for a "Paradise Lost," how the account stands
with him. He can but answer, The work, mighty as has been its cost, is
the joy and glory of my life--perhaps because of its very cost. In a
grand and glorious country you must have the mountains and the valleys;
the depths measure the heights, you cannot divorce them; the t