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 the good God, serenely blessed, should suffer pain to torment His child! How the heavenly powers can bear to look upon it, to hear all the moans of anguish, to see all the wrestlings of pain which each moment distract and waste the beings whom they love! For much of the pain of life man himself is, directly and in the first instance, responsible. He makes it, in spite of God, by his insane folly, passion, or lust. But how much lies at the door of the heavenly Ruler, is His word, His ordinance, the discipline which He presses sternly on His child! Pain, that torments and maddens him while he works; pain that pierces him from everything that he touches, everything that he delights in, every being that he loves; pain, that searches the roots of his courage and endurance, which makes the marrow quiver in his bones, the blood curdle in his heart; pain, which rings from a man who is the very type of endurance the most bitter curses, the most fierce anathemas on the very sunlight which shines on him, on birth and all its agony, on life and all its intolerable woe. “_In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children_,” and everything which is freighted with any portion of thy life. Pain in birth; tears in the eyes of helpless infants on their mother’s bosom; the paths of the wilderness wet with the tears of brave men and women wrestling with pain too sharp for endurance; tears rung out from the glazing eye, when it settles for one painless moment into the fixed, cold stare of death!