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 the most perfect ordinance which could be framed to bless him
(or rather with a view to his full and perfect blessing, for they only
begin what higher influence must complete), by the Almighty Father’s
wisdom, power, and love. I am very anxious that the full force of this
statement should be understood. It is quite possible to take the
following view of it:—Man having placed himself before God in the
attitude of a sinner, justice demanded that he should be sentenced:
toil, care, pain, and death _are_ the sentence, the expression of God’s
anger against the transgressor, making man the outcast of His love; that
then, in pity, God took compassion on the outcast, and began a remedial
work, which, while leaving him still for the present under the action of
the sentence, sought to rescue him ultimately from its final doom. This
would appear to me a very imperfect and partial statement of the truth.
To me it seems as if the whole sentence were the expression of the
tenderness which began to work in the Father’s heart in the very moment
of the transgression. The death which is the righteous doom, the
inevitable fruit, of sin, is in the very moment of the sentence held in
suspense as it were by the promise; and the toil, care, and pain which
are expressed in the sentence are the very first steps of the remedial
work. The sinner in the very moment of transgression is drawn to the
bosom of God’s mercy. Since the first promise was spoken, the death
which was the sinner’s doom can only be tasted in its bitterness by the
man who treats the promise as a thing of nought. And all the hard and
stern conditions of man’s present lot, instead of being the doom of a
judgment from which mercy is moved to rescue him, are themselves the
motions of mercy by which the work of rescue is begun. This is the
principle on which alone it appears to me that the text can be
understood.
I do not propose to occupy your thoughts with any of what I may call the
minor mercies of the sentence, and the minor ministries of toil, care,
and pain to the true development of man. The sentence of toil at once
began man’s higher education. It brought him firmly and sternly, but not
malignly, into contact with the laws which he had broken, and whose
penalties he had defied. Not a morsel of bread could he win without
again submitting to them; humbly, absolutely, utterly, he must become
their servant if he would win the lightest blessing from their hand. But
the blessing was there, it was clearly possible that he should win it.
Hard and stern as has been his toil, through all these ages it has
nourished him. Nature, though stern, is the reverse of malignant; all
her conditions are not penal, but disciplinary; the sentence placed him
at the foot of the ladder, a vision of which Jacob once saw, whose
highest rungs are lost in heaven. But instead of tracing this, I wish to
dwell rather on the ministry of the sentence at once and directly to the
unfolding of man’s Divinest life. The more you look at it, the more
clearly I think will it become apparent to you that it is through toil,
and care, and pain alone that such a being as man can rise to the full
height of his godlike stature, and grow into the likeness and the
fellowship of God. Let me ask you then to consider these three points:—
1. Through toil, and care, and pain, man becomes a creator—not a
servant, but a master workman, and springs, as compared with his
condition in Eden, into a higher region of life.
2. Through toil, and care, and pain, he becomes acquainted with all the
experience of a father; the deepest and noblest relationships unfold
their significance, and unutterably enrich and exalt his life.
3. By toil, and care, and pain, he rises to the full and sympathetic
knowledge of God his Redeemer, and enters into the holiest fellowship of
the universe for ever.
1. The experience which grows out of the sentence constitutes him a
creator, a master workman, and lifts him into a higher region of life.
Man in Eden was the loyal, loving servant of his Creator, no more. God
“_placed him in the garden to dress and to keep it_.” Fair, sweet,
genial work, like life in one of the soft bright islands of the Pacific.
Every moment an exquisite sensation, every movement a pulse of joy.
Well! there you have the whole of it. And I say boldly there is not
enough of it. To dress and to keep even a paradise is poor, slight work
for a being framed and endowed like man. It was inevitable that sooner
or later he should get to the end of its interest and the lees of its
joy. A strong, hardy, brave, cultivated Englishman soon gets to the end
of the soft, sweet life of the Pacific island. It suits the islanders,
who are mostly pulp, morally and mentally,—the human jelly-fish,
without muscle and fibre; but there is not enough of it for the
cultivated and developed man. Toil, pain, and care set the exile of Eden
at once about higher work. He went forth with a great sorrow in his
heart, and a great shadow over his life, into the hard stern wilderness.
There he had not to _dress and to keep_ a garden, but to make one, and
that is altogether higher and nobler work. A higher range of faculties
was at once called into action. He had to create fruitful fields and
homesteads, and to frame a new paradise in imagination, which his
strenuous toil, pain, and care were to realize in time. His creative
work as a husbandman is symbolic of all his creation, his work as
parent, thinker, artist, poet, and master of the world. In Eden
everything was made for him, and was ready to his hand; in the world he
had to make, or at any rate to mould, everything, and to make his hand
ready for an infinite variety of work. And what does this constructive
creative toil imply? It means that he had to discover, to think out, and
to reproduce, by the utmost strain his faculties would bear, the
thoughts of God. He had to study nature, and to master her methods; he
had to discover the uses of his powers and the possibilities of his
life. He rose at once sad and stricken, but grand through the gentleness
which had made him great, to the fulness of a godlike stature; and what
are toil, and pain, and care, through life’s brief day, if they lift man
up to this excellent glory of his manhood, the power to think, to work,
to create, in the track and after the method of God?
2. By toil, and pain, and care, man becomes acquainted with the
experience of a father; the deepest and noblest relationships unfold to
him their significance, and unutterably enrich and exalt his life.
Travail is the symbolic pain. “_In sorrow shalt thou bring forth
children_;” and in sorrow all the products of the higher life are born.
The question is very simple. Ask a woman, when the cry of her first-born
sounds in her ear, and its cheek nestles on her breast, how far the joy
transcends the pain. She can only murmur—“Unspeakably,” and clasp her
nursling closer to her heart. How much the pain enters into and exalts
the joy, who shall tell? Ask the man, a man like poor Palissy, or the
blind bard who got £10 for a “Paradise Lost,” how the account stands
with him. He can but answer, The work, mighty as has been its cost, is
the joy and glory of my life—perhaps because of its very cost. In a
grand and glorious country you must have the mountains and the valleys;
the depths measure the heights, you cannot divorce them; the two make
the beauty which pilgrims come from far to gaze upon, whose vision
quickens the life in its dull springs. And all the toil, and care, and
pain which our intimate, our dearest relations with our fellows cost us,
as husband, wife, parent, brother, sister, friend, teacher, poet,
prophet, will be found closely, essentially connected with our highest,
purest, and most enduring joys. Mothers shall be our witnesses: theirs
is the typical pain, and care, and toil. How say you, careworn, toiling,
but rejoicing mothers? Where lie the springs of your sweetest pleasure,
where lie the treasures which you would guard with life? The toils, the
cares, the pangs that grow out of our human relations in a sad,
struggling, mortal world like this, call forth and string to the finest
tension passions, loves, faculties, thoughts, energies, which Eden never
could have developed. There was little that was noble in the words of
Adam on Eve’s temptation in the garden; indeed, on neither side does any
nobleness appear. But in the wilderness there are men by myriads who
would shield the woman they love from a pang or a reproach, and count
the cost light if they gave their lives. Oh! my friends, take a large
and noble measure of the breadth of thought, feeling, faculty, which
toil, and pain, and care develop; and remember that every filament of
love and care which binds you to a human being, though intensely
sensitive, and therefore in a world like this inevitably doomed to throb
with pain, is a tentacle of your spirit life which can never be detached
from it but by your own baseness, and through which life, joy, rapture
will flow into it in the world in which sin is beaten, crushed for ever,
in which there can be no more tears and no more pain.
One word more.
3. Toil, care, pain raise man to the full and sympathetic knowledge of
God his Redeemer, and bring him into the holiest fellowship of the
universe for ever.
I say bring him. That is God’s purpose; that is what God means by it:
but God does not force him. The word must be mixed with faith in them
that hear it; faith in the Son of God, who died that the sentence might
be a benediction instead of a doom. Some, when they heard, did not,
would not believe; and their carcases fell in the wilderness, and their
bones whiten the sand.
Toil, care, and pain. Does God know nothing of them? “_He is despised
and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him
not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we
did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the
chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are
healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one
to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He
was oppressed, and he was afflicted; yet he opened not his mouth: he is
brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers
is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from
judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out
of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he
stricken._” (Isa. liii. 3–8.) Count it the highest ministry of the
sentence that it enables you to understand that; count it the highest
aim and glory of a man’s life to enter into fellowship with that life of
the Lord. Hold this to be the deepest, most solemn prayer which has ever
been uttered by human lips: “_That I may know him, and the power of his
resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings: being conformed unto
his death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the
dead._” And grudge no pain, nay glory in every pain, which opens to you
a fuller comprehension of the sorrows of the Man of sorrows upon earth,
the joy and glory of the Lord of glory in eternity. Light the affliction
which is but for a moment: its ministry is unspeakable blessing in this
life; you will find it infinite blessing in eternity. Sons of God, wear
with joy the marks of sonship! Brethren of Christ, tread with courage in
the Brother’s footsteps! Heirs of glory, pay gaily with songs the price
by which your glory is to be won.
“_What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came
they?” “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night
in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the
sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of
the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of
waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes._”