supply it. And
the sentence "_dust thou art_" meets him everywhere. He feels it in the
miserable infirmity of his arm; he reads it in the accidents of life and
the decrees of fate. He knows that there are things needful to his
happiness, needful to his very life, things which he would die rather
than miss; and yet they mock the puny efforts of his arm, the feeble
breath of his prayer. He sees them passing hopelessly beyond the limits
of his horizon, and he must live on and drag on from day to day, a
broken, wretched, beggared life. Who has not groaned in utter misery
over his wretched helplessness in the hand of calamity, as though his
life were the sport of a demon, and all his pleasant things but
instruments of torture, with which some malignant spirit can torment his
soul and desolate his life? He is in the presence of masses and forces
in the creation, which oppress and crush his spirit; but there seems to
him a maligner demon behind the veil of the creation, who delights to
make sport of his weakness and burn in the sentence "_dust thou art_"
upon the tablets of his heart. Toil, pain, care, these are the bitter
ingredients of his experience; these make up how much of the daily
course and order of his life. Verily men may well imagine that a curse
was meant here rather than a blessing, and dream that a devil, a
malignant spirit, is nearer to them and more potent on their lives than
God. So dread is the pressure, that in the absence of revelation, in the
absence of the assurance "_Like as a father pitieth his children, so the
Lord pitieth them that fear Him, for He knoweth their frame, He
remembereth that they are dust_," devil worship becomes inevitably the
religion of the pagan world.

Such is the range of the sentence. Now let us ask--

II. What is its work? Is it malign or benignant? Is it, in its very
essence, a curse or a blessing to man?

Our first notion on reading these words, "_Cursed is the ground for thy
sake_," is naturally that part of the curse on man has fallen on the
ground. It is cursed "_for thy sake_," by transition of the curse from
thee. But the word bears a nobler meaning. "For thy sake" may as well,
nay better, mean "with a view to thy good." The root of the sentence
would still be transgression. There had been no need of toil, care, and
pain, had not sin entered into the world. But sin having entered, toil,
care, and pain are ordained for the sake of man in the loftiest sense;
they are th