frontier on this continent, and men have reclaimed either the desert or
the wilderness by their heroic sacrifices and labours. It is a misuse of
language, therefore, to say that the world is made; it is not made,
because it is being made century by century through the toil of successive
generations.

Now, this creative process, in which God and men unite, is what we call
work. It is not a process introduced among men as an afterthought or as a
form of punishment; it was involved in the initial creative act, and it is
part of the complete creative act. The conception of a process of
development carries with it the idea, not of a finished but of an
unfinished world; it interprets history not as a record of persons and
events separate from the stage upon which they appear, like actors on the
boards, but as the story of the influence of an unfinished world upon an
undeveloped race, and of the marvellous unfolding through which the hidden
powers and qualities of the material and the worker are brought into play.
Work becomes, therefore, not only a continuation of the divine activity in
the world, but a process inwrought in the very constitution of that world.
Growth is the divinest element in life, and work is one of the chief
factors in growth.

The earth is, therefore, in its full unfolding and its final form, the
joint product of the love and power of God and of the toil and sacrifice
of men; the creative purpose is not accomplished in a single act; it is
being wrought out through a long progression of acts; and in this
continuous process God and men are brought together in a way which makes
the labour of the hand the work also of the spirit. If one reflects on all
that this intimate cooperation of the divine and the human in the fields,
the factories, and the shops means, the nobility of work and its
possibilities of spiritual education become impressively clear. In this