To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with
eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying
for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
religion.
That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not
mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It
would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And,
for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself
consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he
was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the
garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact,
would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do
in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision
itself is a kind of work?
And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the
punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must
needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better
cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say,
"Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me":
every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can
bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that
monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears
the name of a Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number
of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to
take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross,
the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking
towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.
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