"Solomon and Job," says Pascal, "had most perfect knowledge of human wretchedness, and have given us the most complete description of it: the one was the most prosperous, the other the most unfortunate, of men; the one knew by experience the vanity of pleasure, the other the reality of sorrow." In such diverse ways does God lead men to the same conclusion—that in human life, apart from him, there is no true satisfaction or lasting happiness, that the immortal spirit cannot find rest in things seen and temporal. The words, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity: what profit hath man of all his labor wherein he laboreth under the sun?" (Revised Version), are the key-note of the whole book—the theme which the author maintains by arguments and illustrations drawn from a most varied experience. If Solomon be not the speaker, if we have in Ecclesiastes the composition of a later writer, no more appropriate personage could have been found than the ancient Jewish king to set forth the teaching which the book contains. For he had tasted all the good things human life has to give. On him God had bestowed wisdom and knowledge, riches, wealth, honor, and length of days. All these he had enjoyed to the full, and therefore speaks, or is made to speak, as one from whom nothing had been kept that his soul desired, and who found that nothing results from the mere satisfaction of appetites and desires but satiety and loathing and disappointment. We may contrast with this retrospect of life that given us by One whose aim it was to fulfill the Law of God and secure the well-being of his fellow-men; and we may thus discover the secret of Solomon's failure to win happiness or to reach any lasting result. At the close of his life the Redeemer of mankind summed up the history of his career in the words addressed to God, "I glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do" (John 17:4). It may seem to some a dreary task to follow the course of Solomon's morbid thoughts, but it cannot fail to be profitable, if we undertake the task in the earnest desire to discover the causes of his melancholy and disappointment, and learn from the study how to guide our own lives more successfully, and to enter into the peace and contentment of spirit which, after all his efforts, he failed to make his own. In the first eleven verses of this chapter we have revealed to us the despair and weariness which fell upon the soul of him whose splendor and wisdom raised him above all the men of his time, and made him the wonder of all. succeeding ages. Life seemed to him the emptiest and poorest thing possible—"a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." He might have used the words of the modern philosopher Amiel, "To appear and to vanish,—there is the biography of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe; and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyphic traced for an instant in the sand and effaced a moment afterwards by a breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being—an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, however, the symbol of universal being, and this passing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world." It seemed to him that life yielded no permanent results, that it was insufferably monotonous, and that it was destined to end in utter oblivion. The futility of effort, the monotony of life, and the oblivion that engulfs it at last are the topics of this opening passage of the book. Let us take them up one after the other.
I. THAT LIFE YIELDS NO PERMANENT RESETS. (Verses 1-3.) We have before us, then, the deliberate judgment of one who had full experience of all that men busy themselves with—"the labor wherein they labor under the sun"—the pursuit of riches, the enjoyment of power, the satisfaction of appetites and desires, and so on, and his conclusion is that there is no profit in it all. And his sentence is confirmed by the words of Christ, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" In the case of Solomon, therefore, we have a record of permanent significance and value. We cannot deprive his somber utterances of their weight by saying that he spoke simply as a sated voluptuary, and that others might with more skill or discretion extract from life what he failed to find in it. For, as we shall see, he did not confine himself to mere pursuit of pleasure, but sought satisfaction in intellectual employments and in the accomplishment of great tasks, for which the power and wealth at his disposal were drawn upon to the utmost. His melancholy is not a form of mental disease, but the result of the exhaustion of his energies and powers in the attempt to find satisfaction for the 'soul's cravings. And in melancholy of this kind philosophers have found a proof of the dignity of human nature. "Man's unhappiness," says one of them, "comes of his greatness: it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite He requires, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more and no less: God's infinite universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rises Try him with half of a universe, of an omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a blackspot in our sunshine; it is even the shadow of ourselves" (Carlyle). The very consciousness of the unprofitableness of life, of failure to attain to perfect satisfaction in the possession of earthly benefits, painful as it is, should convince us of the value of the higher and better inheritance, which may be ours, and in which alone we can find rest; and we should take it as a Divine warning to seek after those things that are eternal and unchangeable. Our dissatisfaction and our sorrows are like those of the exile who pines for the pleasant land from which by a hard fate he is for a time dissevered; like the grief of a king who has been deposed. And it is to those whose hunger and thirst cannot be satisfied by things of earth, who find, like Solomon, that there is "no profit in a man's labor wherein he laboreth under the Sun," that God issues the gracious invitation, "Lo, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness." The idea of the unprofitableness of human labor expressed by Solomon is calculated, if carried too far, to put an end to all healthy and strenuous effort to use the powers and gifts God has bestowed upon us, and to lead to indifference and despair. If no adequate result can be secured, if all that remains after prolonged exertion is only a sense of weariness and disappointment, why should we labor at all? But such thoughts are dishonoring to God and degrading to ourselves. He has not sent us into the world to spend our labor in vain, to be overcome with the consciousness of our poverty and weakness. There are ways in which we can glorify him and serve our generation; and he has promised to bless our endeavors, and supply that wherein we come short. Every sincere and unselfish effort we make to help the weak, to relieve the suffering, to teach the ignorant, to diminish the misery that meets us on every hand, and to advance the happiness of our fellows, is made fruitful by his blessing. Something positive and of enduring value may be secured in this way, even "treasure laid up in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal? We may so use the goods, the talents, now committed to our charge, as to create for ourselves friends, who will receive us into everlasting habitations when the days of our stewardship are over, and this visible, tangible world fades away from us.
II. The second reflection of the royal Preacher is that HUMAN LIFE IS INSUFFERABLY MONOTONOUS; that under all outward appearances of variety and change there is a dreary sameness (verses 4-10). Generation succeeds generation, but the stage is the same on which they play their parts, and one performance is very like another. The incessant motion of the sun, traveling from east to west; the shifting of the wind from one point to another, and then back again; the speedy current of the rivers to join the ocean, which yet is not filled by them, but returns them in various ways to water the earth, and to feed the springs, "whence the rivers come;" the commonplace events of human life, are all referred to as examples of endless and monotonous variation. The law of mutability, without progress, seems to the speaker to prevail in heaven and in earth—to rule in the material world, in human society, and in the life of the individual. The lordship over creation, bestowed upon man, appeared to him a vain fancy. Man himself was but a stranger, sojourning here for but a very short time, coming like a wandering bird from the outer darkness into the light and warmth of a festive hall, and soon flitting out back again into the darkness. And, to one in this somber mood, it is not wonderful that all natural phenomena should wear the aspect of instability and change. To the pious mind of the psalmist the sun suggested thoughts of God's glory and power; the majesty of the creature gave him a more exalted idea of the greatness of the Creator, and he expatiated upon the splendor of that light that rules the day. "The heavens were his tabernacle;" morning by morning he was as "a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, and rejoicing as a strong man to run a race." Our Savior saw in the same phenomenon a proof of God's impartial and bountiful love to the children of men: "He maketh his sun to rise upon the evil and the good." But to the melancholy and brooding mind of our author nothing more was suggested by it than monotonous reiteration, a dreary routine of rising and setting. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." "He issues forth, clay after day, from the east, mounts up the vault of heaven until he has reached the meridian, and then he descends at once towards the western horizon. He never stops in his course at midday, as though he had attained the end for which he issued forth with the dawn; he never sinks beneath the horizon to enjoy repose. Even throughout the night he is still hastening onward, that, at the appointed hour, he may again reach his eastern starting-place. The wind, great though its changes may be, seems never to have accomplished the purpose for which it puts forth its power. It never subsides into a state of lasting quiescence; it never even finds a station which it can permanently occupy. It, veereth about continually, 'yet it ever bloweth again according to its circuits.' The streams flow onward to the ocean; but the time never comes when the sea, filled to overflowing, refuses to receive their waters. The thirst of the sea is never quenched; the waters of the rivers are lost; and yet, with unavailing constancy, they still pour their contributions into its bosom" (Tyler). And so with regard to all the other things on which the eye rests, or of which the ear hears—weariness clothes everything; an unutterable monotony amid their changes and variations. Human life, too, all through, is characterized by the same unrest and ceaseless, fruitless labor. Sometimes a new discovery seems to be made; the monotony seems to be broken, and fresh and great results are anticipated by those who are ignorant of the world's past history. But the initiated, those whose experience has made them wise, or whose knowledge has made them learned, recognize the new thing as something that was known in times long ago; they can tell how barren it was of results then, how little, therefore, can be expected from it now. There is scarcely anything more discouraging, especially to the young, than this kind of moralizing. We feel, perhaps, that we can carry out some scheme that will be of benefit to the society about us, and are met with lamentable accounts of how similar schemes were once tried and failed disastrously. We feel moved to attack the evils that we meet in the world, and are assured that they are too great and our own strength too puny for us to accomplish anything worth while. And in the mean time our fervor grows cold, our courage oozes away, and we really lose the power for good we might have had. Now, this teaching of Solomon is not meant for the young and hopeful. Indeed, those who collected together the books of the Old Testament were rather doubtful about including Ecclesiastes among the others, and is ran a narrow chance of being omitted from the sacred canon. But it has its place in the Word of God; and those who have known anything of the doubts and speculations contained in it will find it profitable to trace the course of thought that runs through it, until they find the solid and positive teaching which the Preacher at lasts gives. The distressing fact remains, and must be encountered, that to those who have had long experience of the world, and whose horizon is bounded by it, who see only the things that are done "under the sun," in the midst of ever-recurring changes, there seems to be little or no progress, and that which appears to be new is but a repetition of the old. But they should remember that this world is meant as a place of probation for us—a school in which we are to learn great lessons; and that all the changing circumstances of life serve, and are meant to serve, to develop our nature and character. If it were to be our abiding-place, many improvements in it might be suggested. It is not by any means the best of possible worlds; but for purposes of education, discipline, and testing, it is perfectly adapted. "Rest yet remaineth for the people of God;" it is not here, but in a world to come. This truth is admirably stated by the poet Spenser, who perhaps unconsciously reproduces the melancholy thoughts of Solomon, and answers them. He speaks of Mutability seeking to be honored above all the heavenly powers, as being the chief ruler in the universe, and as indeed governing all things. In a synod of the gods, she is silenced by Nature, who combats her claims, and speaks of a time to come when her present apparent power will come to an end-
"But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
And from thenceforth none no more change shall see."
And then the poet adds—
"When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare [former]
Of Mutability, and well it way,
Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,
In all things else she bears the greatest sway:
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle [unsure],
And love of things so vain to cast away;
Whose flow'ring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
"Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillars of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutability;
For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O! that great Sabbaoth God, grant me that Sabbaoth's sight!"
III. LIFE DESTINED TO END IN UTTER OBLIVION. To all these considerations of the resultlessness of life, of changefulness and monotony, is added that of the oblivion that sooner or later overtakes man and all his works (verse 11). "There is no remembrance of the former generations; neither shall there be any remembrance of the latter generations that are to come, among those that shall come after" (Revised Version). One generation supersedes another; the new come up with fresh interests and schemes of their own, and hustle the old off the stage, and are themselves in their turn forced to give place to those who come up after them. Nations disappear from the earth's surface and are forgotten. The memorials of former civilizations lie buried in the sand, or are defaced and destroyed to make room for something else. On every page of creation we find the sentence written, that there is nothing here that lasts. Almost no means can be devised to carry down to succeeding generations even the names of the greatest conquerors, of men who in their time seemed to have the strength of gods, and to have changed the history of the world. The earth has many secrets in her keeping, and is sometimes forced to yield up a few of them. "The ploughshare strikes against the foundations of buildings which once echoed to human mirth, skeletons of men to whom life once was dear; urns and coins that remind the antiquary of a magnificent empire now long passed away." And so the process goes on. Everything passes. A few years ago and we were not; a hundred years hence, and there may be none who ever heard our names. And a day will come when
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And … leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Abundant material, then, had the Preacher, the son of David, for somber meditation; abundant material for contemplation does he suggest to us. And if we cannot get much further on in speculation than he did, if since his time very little new light has been cast upon the problems which he discusses, we may still refuse to be depressed by melancholy like his. Granted that all is vanity, that restlessness and monotony mark everything in the world, and that its glories soon pass away and are forgotten; still it is not our home. It may dissolve and leave us no poorer. The tie that binds together soul and body may be loosened, and the place that knows us now may soon know us no more. Our confidence is in him, who has promised to take us to himself, that where he is we may be also. "God is our Refuge and Strength... therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed." In contrast with the Preacher's desponding, despairing words about the fruitlessness of life, its monotony and its brevity, we may set the hopeful, triumphant utterance of Christ's apostle: "The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing."—J.W.
Speculative study of the world.
Solomon has made serious allegations concerning human life, and he now proceeds to substantiate them. He has declared that it yields no permanent results, that it is tedious beyond expression, and that it is soon overtaken by oblivion. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" The monotony of things in the natural world—the permanence of the earth in contrast with the changes in human life, the mechanical routine of sunrise and sunset, the ceaseless agitation of the atmosphere, the constant course of rivers to the sea, and so on—had not been the sole ground for his conclusions. He had considered also "all the works that are done under the sun," the whole range of human action, and found in them evidence justifying his allegations. Both in natural phenomena and in human efforts and attainments he found that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. He had, he tells us (Esther 1:12), all the resources of a great monarch at his command—riches, authority, capacity, and leisure; and he applied himself,—he gave his heart to discover, by the aid of wisdom, the nature of earthly pursuits, and found that they were fruitless. He concentrated all his mental energy upon the course of investigation, and continued in it until the conclusion was forced upon him that "in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." So different is the estimate of wisdom and knowledge formed by the Jewish king from that held by other great philosophers and sages, that it is worth while to inquire into the cause of the difference. The explanation is to be found in Esther 1:15, "That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered." It was a practical end that Solomon had in view—to remedy evils and to supply deficiencies. He did not engage in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge for the sake of the pleasure yielded by intellectual activity. In the case of ordinary philosophers and scientists the aim is a different one. "A truth, once known, falls into comparative insignificance. It is now prized, less on its own account than as opening up new ways to new activity, new suspense, new hopes, new discoveries, new self-gratulation—it is not knowledge, it is not truth, that the votary of science principally seeks; he seeks the exercise of his faculties and feelings. Absolute certainty and absolute completion would be the paralysis of any study; and the last worst calamity that could befall man, as he is at present constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his intellectual happiness. And what is true of science is true, indeed, of all human activity. It is ever the contest that pleases us, and not the victory. Thus it is in play; thus it is in hunting; thus it is in the search of truth; thus it is in life. The past does not interest, the present does not satisfy; the future alone is the object which engages us. 'It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy,' says Richter" (Hamilton, 'Metaphysics'). But in the case before us we find that the pleasure afforded by intellectual activity is not regarded by the Preacher as an end sufficient in itself to engage his energies. It is a practical end he has in view; and when he finds that earthly pursuits cannot alter destinies, cannot change the conditions under which we live, cannot set right that which is wrong, or supply that which is wanting for human happiness, he loathes them altogether. The very wisdom and knowledge which he had acquired in his investigations seem to him useless lumber. He wanted to find in life an adequate aim and end, something in which man could find repose. He found it not. "The light which the wisdom he had learned cast on human destiny only exhibited to him the illusions of life, but did not show him one perfect object on which he might rest as a final aim of existence. And therefore he says that 'he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,' since he only thus perceives more and more illusions, whilst nothing is the result, and nihilism is only sorrow of heart". The Preacher then says about the pursuit of wisdom, that though it is implanted by God in the heart of man (Esther 1:13), it is
I. In the first place, then, HE DESCRIBES THE PURSUIT OF WISDOM AS A SEVERE AND LABORIOUS TASK. He looks back upon the course of inquiry he had followed, and declares that it has been a rugged, thorny road. "This sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith." And it is quite in harmony with the spirit of the book that the name of God, which occurs here for the first time, should be coupled with the thought of his laying heavy burdens upon men, since it was by him that this profitless search had been appointed. He remembers all the labors of the way by which he had come—the weariness of brain, the laborious days, the sleepless nights, the frustrated hopes, the disappointments he had experienced; and he counts the pursuit of wisdom but another of the vanities of life. The common run of men, who have no high aims, no desires after a wisdom more than that needed for procuring a livelihood, who are undisturbed by the great problems of life, are spared this painful discipline. It is those who rise above their fellows, that are called to spend their strength and resources, to deny themselves pleasures, and to separate themselves from much of that in which mankind delight and find solace, only to find keener sorrows than those known to their fellows. They do indeed hear and obey the voice of God, but it calls them to suffering and to self-sacrifice. In these days, when the sciences open up before men vast fields for research, there must be many who can verify from their own experience what Solomon says about the laboriousness of the methods used. The infinite patience needed, the observation and cataloguing of multitudinous facts, the inventing of fresh mechanical appliances for facilitating research, the varied experiments, the careful examination of evidence, and the construction and testing of new theories and hypotheses, are the "sore travail" here spoken of.
II. In the second place, THE WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE SO LABORIOUSLY GAINED ONLY MEAN INCREASE OF GRIEG AND SORROW. (Esther 1:18.) There is abundant evidence of the truth of this statement in the experience of those who have made great attainments in intellectual wisdom. For progress in knowledge only convinces man of the little he knows, as compared with the vast universe of being that lies undiscovered. He is convinced of the weakness of his powers, the shortness of the time at his disposal, and the infinite extent of the field, which he desires, but can never hope to take possession of. This thought is expressed in the well-known words of Sir Isaac Newton: "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then with a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me." With increase of intellectual knowledge, with enlarged acquaintance with the thoughts of men, and the various theories of the universe that have been held, and the various solutions of difficulties that have been given, there often comes, too, unwillingess or inability to rest content with any theory or any solution. Doubts, which frequently settle down into definite agnosticism, beset the man who is given to great intellectual activity. And then, too, the fact remains that we cannot by sheer reasoning come to any definite conclusions as to any of the great questions which most concern our happiness. No one can by searching find out God—reach definite knowledge concerning him, his existence, nature, and character; or be assured of the fact of there being an overruling Providence, of the efficacy of prayer, of a life beyond the grave, or of the immortality of the soul. Probable or plausible opinions may be formed, but certainty comes only by revelation and faith. Hence it is that Milton describes some of the fallen angels as wandering hopelessly through these labyrinths of thought and conjecture, and finding in so doing intellectual occupation, but neither solace nor rest.
"Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and late;
Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy."
And it has been said that one of the attractions which this Book of Ecclesiastes has for the present age is in its skeptical questioning, and restless, fluctuating uncertainty. The age can adopt as its own its somber declarations. "Science beasts vaingloriously of her progress, yet mocks us with her grand discovery of progress through pain, telling of small advantages for the few purchased by enormous waste of life, by internecine conflict and competition, and by a deadly struggle with Nature herself, 'red in tooth and claw with ravin,' greedy to feed on the offspring of her own redundant fertility. The revelations of geology and astronomy deepen our depression. The littleness of our lives and the insignificance of our concerns become more conspicuous in comparison with the long and slow procession of the aeons which have gone before, and with the vast ocean of being around us, driven and tossed by enormous, complicated, and unresting forces. A new significance is thus given to the words, 'In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow'" (Tyler). In his celebrated engraving of 'Melaucolia,' Albert Direr has with wonderful skill depicted this mood of intellectual depression. He represents a winged figure, that of a woman seated by the seashore and looking intently into the distance, with bent brows and proud, pensive demeanor. Her thoughts are absorbed in somber meditation, and her wings are folded. A closed book is in her lap. Near her stands a dial-plate, and above it a bell, that strikes the hours as they pass. The sun is rapidly nearing the horizon-line, and darkness will soon enshroud the earth. In her right hand she holds a compass and a circle, emblematic of that infinity of time and space upon which she is meditating. Around her are scattered the various implements of art, and the numerous appliances of science. They have served her purpose, and she now casts them aside, and listlessly ponders on the vanity of all human calculations. Above her is an hour-glass, in which the sands are running low, emblematic of the shortness of the time yet left for fresh schemes and efforts. In like manner the Preacher found that on the moral side increase of knowledge meant increase of sorrow. Knowledge of the true ideal only made him the more conscious of the distance we are from it, and of the hopelessness of our efforts to reach it. The further the research is carried, the more abundant is the evidence discoverable of our moral nature being in a condition of disorder. We find that conscience too often reigns without governing, that natural appetites and desires refuse to submit to her rule, that often motives and feelings which she distinctly condemns, such as pride, envy, selfishness, and cruelty, direct and animate our conduct. All schools of philosophy have recognized the fact of moral disorder in our nature. It is, indeed, unfortunately too evident to be denied or explained away. Aristotle says, "We are more naturally disposed towards those things which are wrong, and more easily carried away to excess than to propriety of conduct." And Hume, "We naturally desire what is forbidden, and often take a pleasure in performing actions merely because they are unlawful. The notion of duty when opposite to the passions is not always able to overcome them; and when it fails of that effect, is apt rather to increase and irritate them, by producing an opposition in our motives and principles." But it is not necessary to multiply Testimony to a fact so generally acknowledged. How this moral disorder originated in human nature is a problem which philosophy is unable to solve, just as it is lacking in ability to correct it. It can discern the symptoms and character of the disease, and describe the course it takes, but cannot cure it. And so the existence of disturbing and lawless forces in our moral nature, the power of evil habit, the social inequalities and disorders which result from the perversity of the individuals of whom society is made up, and the varying codes of morals which exist in the world, are all calculated to distress and perplex him who seeks to make that straight which is crooked, and to supplement that which is defective. Increase of knowledge brings increase of sorrow.—J.W.
Ecclesiastes Intro
Ecclesiastes
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