Work is sweet, for God has blest

Work is sweet, for God has blest. Godfrey Thring* (1823-1903). This hymn, beginning ‘Work is sweet, for God has blest/ Honest work with quiet rest’, is one of many hymns on the topic of work written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (cf. ‘Work! for the night is coming’*). The gospel of laborare est orare, work is prayer, had been a major theme in Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), which in turn stimulated Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work (1852), and influenced the novel-writing of the Victorian age.: Work is sweet, for God has blestHonest work with quiet rest;Rest below, and rest above,In the mansions of his love,When the work of life is done,When the battle’s fought and...