brow, brain, and heart. How bright the contrast of the Eden life! “_And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there 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._”