FRIDAY OF SEPTUAGESIMA WEEK
The curse, which is henceforth to lie so heavily on every
human being, has been expressed in the sentence pronounced against Eve; the
curse, to which the earth itself is to be subjected, is Adam’s sentence.
Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the
tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth
in thy work (that is, on account of what thou hast done). Adam had excused his
sin. God does not admit his excuse; yet He mercifully makes allowance for him,
seeing that he sinned, not so much to gratify himself, as to please the frail
creature that had been formed out of his own substance. He is not the
originator of the disobedient act. God, therefore, sentences him to the personal
humiliation of labour and toil, and of eating his bread in the sweat of his
brow. Outside the garden of Eden, there lies the immense desert of the earth.
It is to be the valley of tears; and there must Adam dwell in exile for upwards
of nine hundred years, with the sad recollection in his heart of the few happy
days spent in paradise! This desert is barren: Adam must give it fruitfulness
by his toil, and draw from it, by the sweat of his brow, his own and his
children’s nourishment.
If, in after ages, some men shall live without toil, they
are the exception confirming the general law and chastisement. They rest,
because others have laboured long and hard for them; neither will God ratify
their exceptional dispensation from labour, except on the condition that they
give encouragement, by their charity and other virtues, to their fellow-men, in
whom Adam’s sentence is literally carried out. Such is the necessity of toil,
that if it be refused, the earth will yield but thorns and thistles; such, too,
the importance of this law imposed on fallen man, that idleness shall not only corrupt his heart, it shall also enervate
his bodily strength.
Before his
sin, the trees of paradise bent down their branches, and man fed on their
delicious fruits; but now he must till the earth and draw from it, with anxiety
and fatigue, the seed which is to give him bread. Nothing could better express the
penal relation between him and the earth, from which he was originally formed,
and which is henceforth to be his tomb, than this law to which God sentences
him, of being indebted to the earth for the nourishment which is to keep him in
life. And yet here also divine mercy shall show itself; for, when God shall have been appeased, it shall
be granted to man to unite himself to his Creator by eating the Bread of life,
which is to come down from heaven, and whose
efficacy for the nourishing of our souls shall be greater than ever the fruit of
the tree of life could have been for the immortalizing of our bodily existence.
NEW ADAM - Glory of the New Born Christ in presence of God the Father
and the Holy Spirit. Detail of a ceiling painting by Daniel Gran in St. Anne's
Church, Vienna. Adam and Eve are portrayed below, in chains.
IN DOMINICA TYROPHAGI
My desire blinded me; and the fruit that grew on Eden’s
tree of knowledge seemed to me to be sweet to eat; but it has been turned into
bitterness. Unhappy man, I have been driven from my home of paradise by
intemperance!
O God of the universe! O merciful Lord! look with pity
upon my lowliness, and suffer me to dwell near thy divine Eden, that so my eyes
may turn towards the fair land I
have lost, and I, by my tears, regain it.
I weep, and sigh, and am afflicted, as I behold the Cherubim
guarding, with a flaming sword, the
gate of paradise, which is shut against all sinners. Alas!
how can I enter, unless thou, my Saviour, grant me admission?
O Christ, my Saviour, my hope is in thy great mercy,
and in the Blood which flowed from thy sacred Side, whereby thou didst sanctify
mankind, and open, O good Jesus, to them that serve thee, the gate of paradise,
which heretofore was
shut against Adam.
(O gate of life! Spiritual gate, which God has kept
for himself! O Virgin-Mother of God, espoused to none but him! Open to me, by
thy prayers, the once closed gate of heaven; that so I may glorify thee, who, after
God, art my helper and sure refuge!)
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