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_;” 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 there he put the man
whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow
every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of
life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good
and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from
thence it was parted, and became into four heads.... And the Lord God
took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to
keep it._” (Gen. ii. 8–10, 15.) Sweet, light labour, parent of yet
sweeter rest. To dress and to keep the garden! A garden planted by the
hand of the Lord. The fairest, brightest garden of the creation; dewy
fragrance, radiant colour, splendid form; all that imagination can dream
of beauty and glory, bathing man’s life in an atmosphere of ravishing,
exquisite, inexhaustible joy. One act of transgression, and the garden
vanished. Like a dream it faded; and hard, stern realities, unlovely
hues, ungraceful forms, unkindly elements, rose round Adam in its room.
Instead of the garden where the touch of the Divine hand still lingered
in forms and tones of bewildering beauty, a bare hard wilderness
stretched everywhere around him, whence not a morsel of bread could be
wrung but by the most strenuous labour; where not a gleam of beauty, not
a nestling nook of verdure, would smile on him, until he had created it
by earnest, persistent, and wasting toil. “_Cursed is the ground._”
2. Pain. Part of the sentence of toil is pain. “_Unto the woman he said,
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, and thy conception; in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and
he shall rule over thee._” (Gen. iii. 16.) The fountain-head of pain is
travail. It begins at birth, it ends in death; life on the whole,
between the limits, is one long struggle to endure. “Men must work, and
women must weep.” It is not a complete division: for men weep while they
work, and women work while they weep; toil and tears are the bitter
heritage of us all. But the man has on the whole the chief share of the
strain, the woman of the pain, of life. Her life, if she has a woman’s
nobleness and the sense of a woman’s mission, is one long travail. This
bearing and rearing of children is symbolic. What is the life of all
noble, unselfish, ministering natures, but the continual bringing forth,
with sore pain of travail, of things which shall gladden and enrich the
world? But pain is a great mystery. Why the good God, serenely blessed,
should suffer pain to torment His child! How the heavenly powers can
bear to look upon it, to hear all the moans of anguish, to see all the
wrestlings of pain which each moment distract and waste the beings whom
they love! For much of the pain of life man himself is, directly and in
the first instance, responsible. He makes it, in spite of God, by his
insane folly, passion, or lust. But how much lies at the door of the
heavenly Ruler, is His word, His ordinance, the discipline which He
presses sternly on His child! Pain, that torments and maddens him while
he works; pain that pierces him from everything that he touches,
everything that he delights in, every being that he loves; pain, that
searches the roots of his courage and endurance, which makes the marrow
quiver in his bones, the blood curdle in his heart; pain, which rings
from a man who is the very type of endurance the most bitter curses, the
most fierce anathemas on the very sunlight which shines on him, on birth
and all its agony, on life and all its intolerable woe. “_In sorrow
shalt thou bring forth children_,” and everything which is freighted
with any portion of thy life. Pain in birth; tears in the eyes of
helpless infants on their mother’s bosom; the paths of the wilderness
wet with the tears of brave men and women wrestling with pain too sharp
for endurance; tears rung out from the glazing eye, when it settles for
one painless moment into the fixed, cold stare of death!
3. Care. “_Dust thou art._” Here lies the secret of care. I believe that
these words suggest altogether the most bitter and miserable experience
of mankind. Toil may be borne, pain may be borne; but who in his own
strength can wrestle with and master care? Man’s condition is that of
the most dependent of beings, while the things which he needs for the
satisfaction of his nature refuse to recognise the mastery of his hand.
He comes into the world the most helpless of all the infants of
creation. It is horrible to imagine what a human infant, in the hands of
a careless or cruel parent, may be made to endure. And this condition of
his infancy follows him through life: he is really an infant, a
nursling, as dependent for the daily bread of body, mind, and spirit on
supplies which he cannot command, as an infant at the mother’s breast.
So large is the range of his necessities, so infinite his wants, that he
needs just the arm and the treasure of the Omnipotent to 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.