Misread Passage of Scriptures Part 4

2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy and grace of G.o.d.

_Things_ cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their record remains, for ever. But, blessed be G.o.d, they may be trans.m.u.ted, and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A sinner's lot you inherit, a sinner's experience you must know, a sinner's agony you must taste, a sinner's horror of darkness you must pa.s.s through--to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you beautiful and glorious, a thing to be won by toil and tears and prayers; but if your soul pines in its rioting, if it sickens in its worldly wealth and splendour, if the question forces itself upon you as it never seems to have forced itself upon Esau, "_What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?_" then the sinner's anguish, from which there is no escape for any one of us, may be made by Christ's dear love the strait gate to the splendour, the glory, the bliss of heaven. And this is Redemption. Divine love, love that could die, love that _did_ die, that its beloved ones might not die, is the solvent which trans.m.u.tes all the shame and pain of sin to heavenly glory and bliss. "_Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord._" Here is no reversal, no obliteration of the past, mark you; the thing that was is and shall be; no power in the universe can blot out its trace. The experience of a sinner is part of your being, and in its trans.m.u.ted form must remain part of your being, through eternity. These wounds and sores of sin, suffused by Christ's great love, become the l.u.s.trous pearls of heaven. Nothing in the past, I care not how dark or d.a.m.ning it may be, is irreparable by the love which "_endured the cross and despised the shame_," that it might win the right and the power to redeem. There is no sin whose stains may not be wept out at the Redeemer's feet. There is no life which may not win "She hath loved much, for she hath much forgiven" as its record, earnest of a rapture of eternal bliss. But dream not that the path can be an easy one, and that penitence can trans.m.u.te the sorrow into joy by a word. You have done that whose issues could only be undone by the agony and b.l.o.o.d.y sweat of Gethsemane, the cross and pa.s.sion of Calvary; and you too must die, die to sin, that you may live to G.o.d. The flesh, which has despised your birthright, must be mortified, crucified, by grace. "_I am crucified with Christ_" you must learn to say; you must know the fellowship of the sufferings of your Master, and taste the cup of which He drank the dregs, or the lost birthright is lost for ever, and the deed done on earth remains irreparable as well as irrevocable through eternity.

VII.

THE CURSE OF THE GROUND.

"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 chastis.e.m.e.nt, 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 G.o.d'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, G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. 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_;" "_G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 desolating forces in the physical structure of the world. The earth has been torn and convulsed as by the spasm of some great agony, and the signs of it lie thick around. Huge beds of rock, thousands of feet in thickness, have been cracked and shivered like potsherds; streams of molten metal have been injected into the fissures, and have surged through the rents and swept vast floods of burning lava over the smiling plains. There must have been times in the history of the development of this earth, fair and calm as it lies now under the sun, when its whole structure must have been shaken to the very centre; when there was dread peril lest, like some lost planet, it should be shattered into fragments and fill its...o...b..t with a cloud of wreck. But some sure hand has helped earth's travail, and has brought forth out of the chaos of struggle and storm an orderly, smiling, serene, and beautiful world. The signs of past agony are there, to those whose eye can pierce the surface; but a loving hand has clothed it all with a glow of beauty and a robe of grace. The regions where the convulsion was fiercest, where the scars are deepest, are the regions of glorious mountain beauty, whither pilgrims wend as to nature's most sacred shrine. The rents and chasms, clothed with the most splendid forests, with streams leaping and sparkling through the emerald meadows to the hollows below, breathe nothing but beauty, and stir all hearts to joy and praise. The touch of the destroyer is everywhere masked by beauty; and out of the chaos of confusion G.o.d has drawn forth, what never could have been but for the chaos, the infinite variety, the grace, the splendour, the glory of the world.

This mystery of order and beauty, of cosmos, which reveals itself to us in nature, unveils itself too in man's spiritual world. Life, the life of the human, bears traces everywhere of kindred dislocation. A great convulsion has rent man's nature, has torn it away from G.o.d and from Eden, and scattered what, but for a redeeming restoring hand, would have been blasted wrecks, about the world. Toil, pain, care, anguish have chased the serenity and bliss of paradise from man's heart and from man's world. Earth is full of wailing, and life of misery. Looking at its surface aspects, we are tempted to call this life of man the abortion of freedom, and to cry with Job, with Jeremiah, Why did it not perish before it saw the sun? Look deeper. As in nature, so in man's life, a loving restoring hand has been working; the wastes of sin are already clothed with some tints of greenness; flowers of rare beauty and splendour spring up on what sin had made a dreary, blasted desert. The moral chaos, touched by the hand of the Divine love, the love of G.o.d the Redeemer, already puts on some dress of beauty; nay, it glows here and there with a nascent glory whose fountain is beyond the stars. Some vision of a grand and glorious purpose of redemption unveils itself as we search the secrets of man's sad history. "_Where sin abounded_," we read in the book of life as well as in the book of Scripture, "_grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord_." (Rom. v. 20, 21.) What we see accomplished helps us to realize the visions of the prophetic word. "_The wilderness and the solitary place, shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our G.o.d._" "_Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons where each lay, shall be gra.s.s with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness: the unclean shall not pa.s.s over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away._" (Isa. x.x.xv. 1, 2, 5-10.) Sin, the sin of the first parent, which every child of Adam repeats, is the fundamental fact of man's being; no religion, no philosophy, which makes light of it can lay firm hold of man's conscience and heart. But, blessed be G.o.d, grace is the crowning fact; and it is the crown which will remain conspicuous through eternity.

The sentence on sin then is a dread reality. "_The soul that sinneth it shall die_" remains as G.o.d's judgment record, which no art or effort of man can cancel. But in this first sentence on His sinful child G.o.d has wondrously interwoven benediction and judgment, warning and promise, words of life and dooms of death. On the serpent the curse is decisive and final: "_And the Lord G.o.d said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life._" (Gen. iii. 14.) But the sternness relaxes and the doom melts into a promise, when the Judge addresses Himself to man. The very curse on the serpent is pregnant with blessing to the woman and her seed; the Executor of the Lord's judgment on the tempter is the everlasting triumphant Redeemer of mankind. And throughout the sentence on our race blessing ranges in fellowship with judgment; and the sternest words, prophets of many ills and sorrows, are rich benedictions in disguise. And this "_cursed is the ground_" is amongst them. It sounds hard and stern, and prophesies a long and hard apprenticeship of toil and pain; but stern as it seems, it is part of the blessing and not of the cursing, of the benediction and not of the doom. It describes the first stage of the redemptive process of which the sentence on the serpent had spoken, and is the condition of man's elevation out of the estate of a sinful, suffering, degraded creature to the friendship, fellowship, and likeness of G.o.d. In order that we may appreciate this, and see the true meaning and bearing of the judgment, I shall ask you to consider with me--

I. The range of the sentence.

II. Its work.

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 pa.s.sion, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.d planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.bleness 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 n.o.ble, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, by his insane folly, pa.s.sion, or l.u.s.t. 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.ses 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 G.o.d. So dread is the pressure, that in the absence of revelation, in the absence of the a.s.surance "_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?

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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.d in the att.i.tude of a sinner, justice demanded that he should be sentenced: toil, care, pain, and death _are_ the sentence, the expression of G.o.d's anger against the transgressor, making man the outcast of His love; that then, in pity, G.o.d took compa.s.sion 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.dlike stature, and grow into the likeness and the fellowship of G.o.d. 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 n.o.blest 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 G.o.d his Redeemer, and enters into the holiest fellowship of the universe for ever.

1. The experience which grows out of the sentence const.i.tutes 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. G.o.d "_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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d?

2. By toil, and pain, and care, man becomes acquainted with the experience of a father; the deepest and n.o.blest 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 pa.s.sions, loves, faculties, thoughts, energies, which Eden never could have developed. There was little that was n.o.ble in the words of Adam on Eve's temptation in the garden; indeed, on neither side does any n.o.bleness 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d his Redeemer, and bring him into the holiest fellowship of the universe for ever.

I say bring him. That is G.o.d's purpose; that is what G.o.d means by it: but G.o.d does not force him. The word must be mixed with faith in them that hear it; faith in the Son of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastis.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d shall wipe away all tears from their eyes._"

VIII.

THE EASILY BESETTING SIN.

"The sin which doth so easily beset us."--HEB. xii. 1.

These words occur at the close of the most brilliant rhetorical pa.s.sage of the New Testament scripture. They form the point too of the most close, subtle, and profound argument which is to be met with even in the epistles of St. Paul. We constantly use them; no sentence of the Bible is more frequently on our lips. But we isolate them from their surroundings; we handle them as though they dealt with private matters of individual experience, the sins and follies to which each nature in its private propension is specially p.r.o.ne, rather than some broad human fault or infirmity which is the common sin and sorrow of mankind. We must read these words in connection with the great argument of which they form the culmination, and the splendid burst of eloquence which they close; or we shall miss their large and weighty meaning, and shall narrow to a private and partial experience what the writer intends to set forth as the easily besetting sin of mankind. The Epistle to the Hebrews is certainly one of the most important and profound books in the New Testament. Be it by Paul himself, as I believe, or be it by some Pauline man, it is in a measure the keystone of the arch of revelation, if the Apocalypse is its crown. The way in which, in the order of the Divine dispensations, the old grows into the new--the method by which, while so much once ordained by G.o.d goes apparently to wreck, to the eye of G.o.d and in the judgment of the far-sighted among men nothing Divine really perishes, no Divine promise fails of fulfilment, no Divine purpose or hope misses its fruit--is a subject of supreme importance, the consideration of which is needful to the completeness of Scripture, while it is full of suggestion as a key to the Divine ways, to the successive generations of mankind. Judaism has pa.s.sed away in every respect in which it is stronger than a memory. It is essentially, though Jews live among us in Christendom by millions, a thing of the past; but the Epistle to the Hebrews, which unfolds the method by which Judaism developed into Christianity, is a living book in our Bibles, as full of vital interest for this present time as it was for the generation which watched with strange awe and wonder the tremendous overthrow of the elect nation, and saw the last fragments of the ritual and order of a Divinely established system swept along by the flood as wreck. There is profound instruction concerning the method of development in Christendom--how the Church grows, and strikes deeper root through the ages, while that which men call the Church and cling to suffers constant shocks, and is ever dropping piecemeal into decay and death--in this sketch of the philosophy of the most remarkable and startling development recorded in man's spiritual history. Whether Paul wrote it or not, it is the work of a man with Paul's grasp of intellect, and saturated with Paul's ideas both of Judaism and Christianity. One can hardly imagine Paul's life-work complete to his own mind without the production of such an essay as this. He alone grasped with perfect clearness the vital relation of the two dispensations; and we can well imagine with what intense earnestness this Hebrew of the Hebrews must have desired to justify his apostolic ministry to his countrymen and to mankind. Be this as it may, and these a priori judgments are of little worth in criticism, the book is one of large thoughts, views, and principles, reaching deep down to the foundations on which the edifice of man's spiritual faith and hope is built.

Let us try to realize some of the main difficulties of those to whom it is addressed, whose tormenting doubts and apprehensions it was intended to remove. They would be chiefly, I think, of two kinds; and they might be put into the shape of questions.