emain conspicuous through eternity.

The sentence on sin then is a dread reality. "_The soul that sinneth it
shall die_" remains as God's judgment record, which no art or effort of
man can cancel. But in this first sentence on His sinful child God has
wondrously interwoven benediction and judgment, warning and promise,
words of life and dooms of death. On the serpent the curse is decisive
and final: "_And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast
done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of
the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the
days of thy life._" (Gen. iii. 14.) But the sternness relaxes and the
doom melts into a promise, when the Judge addresses Himself to man. The
very curse on the serpent is pregnant with blessing to the woman and her
seed; the Executor of the Lord's judgment on the tempter is the
everlasting triumphant Redeemer of mankind. And throughout the sentence
on our race blessing ranges in fellowship with judgment; and the
sternest words, prophets of many ills and sorrows, are rich benedictions
in disguise. And this "_cursed is the ground_" is amongst them. It
sounds hard and stern, and prophesies a long and hard apprenticeship of
toil and pain; but stern as it seems, it is part of the blessing and not
of the cursing, of the benediction and not of the doom. It describes the
first stage of the redemptive process of which the sentence on the
serpent had spoken, and is the condition of man's elevation out of the
estate of a sinful, suffering, degraded creature to the friendship,
fellowship, and likeness of God. In order that we may appreciate this,
and see the true meaning and bearing of the judgment, I shall ask you to
consider with me--

I. The range of the sentence.

II. Its work.

I. The range of the sentence. It is the sentence, as far as it bears on
man's present condition and experience, that I wish to consider,--the
"men must work and women must weep" aspect of our life--excluding the
deeper and more tremendous question of death and its issues. Not that
any full consideration of the one is possible without reference to the
other. The whole sentence hangs together; our life is of one texture,
one warp runs through the whole piece; and every groan, every pain,
every bead of sweat upon the brow, every shadow that glooms over the
life, has its full interpretation in the fact that "_sin has entered
into the world, and death by sin_;