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. 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?