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.