" all pain is truly a beginning to
die. But for our present purpose it is possible sufficiently to isolate
the conditions of man's life as the workman and the sufferer, and to
consider how they bear, benignly or malignly, on his essential interests
as a spiritual being and his education for the destiny which through
grace sin has been instrumental to create rather than to destroy. The
elements of the sentence which are closely connected with the cursing of
the ground, which in fact are links of the same chain, are three:--

Toil--pain--care.

1. Toil. This is fundamental. On this man's existence hangs; to pause
here is to stop the pulse of life. "_And unto Adam he said, Because thou
hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of
which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the
ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy
life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou
shalt eat the herb of the field: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return._" (Gen. iii. 17-19.)
The life of man in Eden was as free from toil as the life of a bee among
the limes. Toil is wearing, wasting work; work to which no inward
impulse, but the pressure of a stern necessity, moves us; work which we
must do, whether we love it or whether we hate it, whether it gently
tasks us or strains and exhausts our wearied powers; work which compels
us to put aside much that we would infinitely more gladly work at, which
cuts us off from pleasant occupation, profitable to our intellectual and
social life; work, in a word, which puts a yoke upon us, a yoke which
wears and galls; work which makes us moan, and curse the day that we
were born to it, and fills us with wild, rebellious passion, which vents
itself in railings, blaspheming the wisdom and goodness of the Creator
and the divine order and beauty of the world. This is the work which we
sinners are born to; work which urges us with bloody spur, and exacts a
tribute of our life-blood as it drives us through the merciless round.
This is toil. This is what the curse of the ground has done for us; we
eat our bread, not joyously, thankfully, as in Eden, but in the sweat of
brow, brain, and heart. How bright the contrast of the Eden life! "_And
the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and th