wo make
the beauty which pilgrims come from far to gaze upon, whose vision
quickens the life in its dull springs. And all the toil, and care, and
pain which our intimate, our dearest relations with our fellows cost us,
as husband, wife, parent, brother, sister, friend, teacher, poet,
prophet, will be found closely, essentially connected with our highest,
purest, and most enduring joys. Mothers shall be our witnesses: theirs
is the typical pain, and care, and toil. How say you, careworn, toiling,
but rejoicing mothers? Where lie the springs of your sweetest pleasure,
where lie the treasures which you would guard with life? The toils, the
cares, the pangs that grow out of our human relations in a sad,
struggling, mortal world like this, call forth and string to the finest
tension passions, loves, faculties, thoughts, energies, which Eden never
could have developed. There was little that was noble in the words of
Adam on Eve's temptation in the garden; indeed, on neither side does any
nobleness appear. But in the wilderness there are men by myriads who
would shield the woman they love from a pang or a reproach, and count
the cost light if they gave their lives. Oh! my friends, take a large
and noble measure of the breadth of thought, feeling, faculty, which
toil, and pain, and care develop; and remember that every filament of
love and care which binds you to a human being, though intensely
sensitive, and therefore in a world like this inevitably doomed to throb
with pain, is a tentacle of your spirit life which can never be detached
from it but by your own baseness, and through which life, joy, rapture
will flow into it in the world in which sin is beaten, crushed for ever,
in which there can be no more tears and no more pain.

One word more.

3. Toil, care, pain raise man to the full and sympathetic knowledge of
God his Redeemer, and bring him into the holiest fellowship of the
universe for ever.

I say bring him. That is God's purpose; that is what God means by it:
but God does not force him. The word must be mixed with faith in them
that hear it; faith in the Son of God, who died that the sentence might
be a benediction instead of a doom. Some, when they heard, did not,
would not believe; and their carcases fell in the wilderness, and their
bones whiten the sand.

Toil, care, and pain. Does God know nothing of them? "_He is despised
and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it