ere he put the man
whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow
every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of
life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good
and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from
thence it was parted, and became into four heads.... And the Lord God
took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to
keep it._" (Gen. ii. 8-10, 15.) Sweet, light labour, parent of yet
sweeter rest. To dress and to keep the garden! A garden planted by the
hand of the Lord. The fairest, brightest garden of the creation; dewy
fragrance, radiant colour, splendid form; all that imagination can dream
of beauty and glory, bathing man's life in an atmosphere of ravishing,
exquisite, inexhaustible joy. One act of transgression, and the garden
vanished. Like a dream it faded; and hard, stern realities, unlovely
hues, ungraceful forms, unkindly elements, rose round Adam in its room.
Instead of the garden where the touch of the Divine hand still lingered
in forms and tones of bewildering beauty, a bare hard wilderness
stretched everywhere around him, whence not a morsel of bread could be
wrung but by the most strenuous labour; where not a gleam of beauty, not
a nestling nook of verdure, would smile on him, until he had created it
by earnest, persistent, and wasting toil. "_Cursed is the ground._"

2. Pain. Part of the sentence of toil is pain. "_Unto the woman he said,
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, and thy conception; in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and
he shall rule over thee._" (Gen. iii. 16.) The fountain-head of pain is
travail. It begins at birth, it ends in death; life on the whole,
between the limits, is one long struggle to endure. "Men must work, and
women must weep." It is not a complete division: for men weep while they
work, and women work while they weep; toil and tears are the bitter
heritage of us all. But the man has on the whole the chief share of the
strain, the woman of the pain, of life. Her life, if she has a woman's
nobleness and the sense of a woman's mission, is one long travail. This
bearing and rearing of children is symbolic. What is the life of all
noble, unselfish, ministering natures, but the continual bringing forth,
with sore pain of travail, of things which shall gladden and enrich the
world? But pain is a great mystery. Why t