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