Man in Eden was the loyal, loving servant of his Creator, no more. God “placed him in the garden to dress and to keep it.” Fair, sweet, genial work, like life in one of the soft bright islands of the Pacific. Every moment an exquisite sensation, every movement a pulse of joy. Well! there you have the whole of it. And I say boldly there is not enough of it. To dress and to keep even a paradise is poor, slight work for a being framed and endowed like man. It was inevitable that sooner or later he should get to the end of its interest and the lees of its joy. A strong, hardy, brave, cultivated Englishman soon gets to the end of the soft, sweet life of the Pacific island. It suits the islanders, who are mostly pulp, morally and mentally,—the human jelly-fish, without muscle and fibre; but there is not enough of it for the cultivated and developed man. Toil, pain, and care set the exile of Eden at once about higher work. He 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 £10 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 two 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 were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted; yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.” (Isa. liii. 3-8.) Count it the highest ministry of the sentence that it enables you to understand that; count it the highest aim and glory of a man’s life to enter into fellowship with that life of the Lord. Hold this to be the deepest, most solemn prayer which has ever been uttered by human lips: “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings: being conformed unto his death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.” And grudge no pain, nay glory in every pain, which opens to you a fuller comprehension of the sorrows of the Man of sorrows upon earth, the joy and glory of the Lord of glory in eternity. Light the affliction which is but for a moment: its ministry is unspeakable blessing in this life; you will find it infinite blessing in eternity. Sons of God, wear with joy the marks of sonship! Brethren of Christ, tread with courage in the Brother’s footsteps! Heirs of glory, pay gaily with songs the price by which your glory is to be won.
“What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”