Cursed is the ground for thy sake."--GEN. iii. 17.

Are these words part of a curse, or part of a blessing? Are they a
sentence on man, the doom of his transgression, or the first stage of a
process destined to issue in the redemption of the heir of promise from
sorrow and sin for ever? Few phrases are more frequently on our lips
than "the curse of labour." Men, women, yea little children,
overburdened and crushed by the stern toil which is the necessity of
their existence, easily catch up the sentence, and submit to the
necessity in the sullen bitter mood with which a slave accepts his
chastisement, or a criminal the sentence of doom. Few things are more
firmly fixed in our minds than that the toil and the strain of life are
God's curse on transgression, having merciful bearings and issues no
doubt for the man who lovingly submits to the discipline, but in
themselves evil and hateful, born of sin, and a part of death.

I propose to examine this idea in the present discourse, and to
endeavour to estimate this curse upon the ground in its bearings on
man's development as a spiritual being, and his relations to his
Redeemer, God. That toil, care, and pain spring out of the one great act
of transgression which every life repeats is the plain and indisputable
affirmation of the word of God. The dark tones of man's present life
gloom against a background of radiant brightness and beauty; in the
childhood of humanity, as in the life of every human child, Eden shines
behind all the toil and sorrow of the world. There has been a grand
cataclysm in man and in nature. The structure of the world has been
rent and contorted, and the fractures and contortions repeat themselves
in life. "_Sin entered into the world, and death by sin_;" "_God made
man upright, but he sought out many inventions_," are the sentences of a
sound philosophy, estimating the facts of consciousness and history, as
well as statements of the word of God. There has been a fall, a rupture,
by the sinful guilty action of the freewill of the creature, of the
pristine perfect relation between man and God and man and the world.
Transgression, the sinful exercise of freedom, is the fundamental fact
of man's present nature and life; and the sentence on the transgressor,
the inevitable sentence, "_the soul that sinneth it shall die_," lies at
the root of all the bitter anguish of the world.

There are abundant signs of the action of terribly destructive and
desolati