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LECTURES ON ECCLESIASTES. 
 
 BRADLEY. 
 
HENRY FROWDE 
 
 Oxford University Press Warehouse 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
LECTURES ON ECCLESIASTES 
 
 DELIVERED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 
 
 BY THE VERY REV. 
 
 GEORGE GRANVILLE BRADLEY, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF WESTMINSTER 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1885 
 
 \^An rights reserved J 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following Lectures were delivered in Westminster 
 Abbey on Saturday afternoons during three months of the 
 winter of 1884-5. They form one of several courses of 
 weekly addresses on portions of, or subjects connected 
 with, Holy Scripture, which have been given in the same 
 Church by Canons of Westminster, or by the Dean, 
 during the last four years. The experiment of inviting 
 the public to meet in the Abbey on week-days for such a 
 purpose was first tried by the late Dean Stanley, who in 
 the very month in which he died was devoting a portion 
 of every Saturday afternoon to a Lecture on the Beatitudes. 
 Of the aim and purpose of those who have followed his 
 example enough has been said in the opening words of 
 the first of the following Lectures. The publication how- 
 ever of the present course may require a word of explana- 
 tion, or even of apology. 
 
 Its author can make no claim to have enlarged by 
 independent researches of his own the field of knowledge 
 accessible to the theologian or the student. He is no 
 Hebraist, and his acquaintance with Talmudic and Rab- 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 binical literature is necessarily derived from such English, 
 French, or German sources as are open to any educated 
 reader. Nor have his own studies been such as to have 
 enabled him to throw any fresh light on the patristic exe- 
 gesis of the book of Ecclesiastes. He has read much and 
 thought much on every line of that book; but he cannot 
 venture to look on the present volume as a contribution to 
 exegetical or theological literature properly so called. It 
 has no such pretensions. 
 
 But the obvious interest taken in these lectures during 
 their delivery encouraged him to believe that the large 
 number of singularly patient and attentive listeners whom 
 M'eek after week he saw before him in the Abbey might 
 represent others, who would attach some value to a popular 
 and continuous exposition of the contents of a book which 
 has by turns attocted, Derple xe(J. and iSfi£il£dii*^«iy£«i8 
 through many centuries, and the study of which has been 
 prosecuted with renewed activity both in England and on 
 the Continent during the last few years. Nearly a quarter of 
 a century has passed since Dr. Ginsburg's valuable edition 
 placed in the hands of the ordinary English reader, not 
 only an excellent commentary on the book itself, but 
 also an exceedingly interesting sketch of earlier and more 
 recent Jewish and Christian commentators, as well as of 
 the ancient versions. Since that time such works as, among 
 others, those of Dr. Samuel Cox\ Dr. Wright^, and, above all, 
 the scholarly and instructive volume of Dean Plumptre ^ have 
 
 ^ ' The Quest of the Chief Good.' 
 
 2 'The Book of Koheleth,' 18S3. 
 
 ^ 'Ecclesiastes or the Preacher,' 1S81. 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 testified to the general interest felt in the history and contents 
 of this portion of the Old Testament by the English public. 
 On the other hand, the recent volume of INI. Renan, anil the 
 elaborate work of Graetz. are sufficient evidence that the 
 question of the authorship and design of a book which 
 deals with problems of such wide and enduring interest 
 has not lost its hold on readers in France and Germany. 
 
 In preparing himself for the writing and delivery of his 
 own lectures the writer has freely availed himself of the 
 labours of these and many other authorities, both English 
 and foreign ; among the latter he is especially indebted 
 to Ewald, Hitzig and Reuss. He has rarely attempted to 
 acknowledge his special obligations to any single writer 
 or commentator, nor indeed would he find it easy to do 
 so. Nor had he any wish to load his pages with footnotes 
 and references. He must be content with thankfully ac- 
 knowledging the aid which he has received from many 
 sources, and in expressing the hope that he has done 
 something towards facilitating for the general reader, and 
 for those who have little leisure or taste for more methodical 
 study, the acquisition of some acquaintance with the con- 
 tents and general teaching of one of the most interesting 
 and instructive, yet most obscure of the writers of the Old 
 Testament. His own views of the contents and history 
 of the book he has embodied in the pages that follow. 
 Those who care to read them will remember that they 
 were delivered at intervals of a week to a mixed congre- 
 gation, necessarily of a somewhat uncertain and varying 
 character, and will excuse a certain amount of repetition, 
 which under such circumstances was unavoidable. 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 It should be added that the Revised Translation of the 
 Old Testament was not published till the present volume 
 was in the Press ; references however to its rendering of 
 some of the most obscure or most disputed passages have 
 been inserted wherever it appeared desirable. 
 
LECTURES ON ECCLESIASTES. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 Introductory. 
 
 Let me begin by reminding those to whom I speak of 
 the origin and aim of this course of lectures. 
 
 It occurred to some of those whose privilege it is to min- 
 ister in this venerable and sacred House of God, that there 
 were many who would gladly meet here, on these winter 
 afternoons, for another purpose than that of either joining 
 in actual worship, or of receiving that spiritual instruction 
 to give which is the highest of all objects to which a Christian 
 preacher can devote himself. 
 
 It was thought that there were not a few who, in an age 
 of keen enquiry and active thought, would hail some attempt 
 to bring before them some of the results of a careful and 
 exact study of various portions of that manifold and com- 
 plex collection of sacred literature, which we call by the 
 common name of the Bible, and in which we Christians find 
 the record of that gradual manifestation by God of Himself 
 to man, which this morning's second lesson spoke of as at 
 last perfected in His Son \ The experiment was fairly tried 
 
 * Hebrews i. i . Lesson for November 8. 
 B 
 
2 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [i. 
 
 by one and another among us, and ihe result more than con- 
 firmed our expectations. It was found that there were many, 
 men and women, young and old, not a few of them men 
 immersed in the busy and anxious life of this great metropolis, 
 who felt a keen interest in receiving some assistance towards 
 understanding more clearly than before, either the relations 
 towards each other of some of the component parts of the 
 Old and New Testament, or again, the actual contents, and 
 meaning, and the place, not only in the Bible, but in the 
 divine education of the human race, of one or another of the 
 books — especially of the less generally studied books — which 
 it comprises. 
 
 It was the latter of these tasks which I attempted two years 
 ago, when, for some weeks together, I spoke on the general 
 contents and teaching of the Book of Job. I tried then to 
 bring home to those who, week after week, encouraged me 
 by their sympathy and attention, the true scope and sub- 
 ject of that marvellous book, which some outside the circle 
 of the Church of Christ have described as the greatest of all 
 works of human genius, some within that circle have looked 
 on as a fruitless and discursive discussion of inscrutable 
 problems. 
 
 It was my object to lead my hearers to see that, if they 
 Avould read its chapters carefully and consecutively, read them 
 even in the striking language of our own stately, though at 
 times obscure and inadequate, translation, they would find in 
 them something more than a touching record of Oriental 
 resignation, or even than an example to all time of loving 
 submission to the will of a God who gives and who takes away. 
 I tried to make them feel with me that they had set before 
 them in that book something more than this ; I wished them 
 to recognise that the ' patience of Job ' of which St. James 
 speaks included other elements than those of mere submission 
 and acquiescence. I aimed at putting before them the true and 
 actual picture which the book presents — a picture of a human 
 
I.] Introductory. 3 
 
 soul face to face with the very darkest problems that can even 
 now try the intellect, or tax the faith, or perplex the con- 
 science of mankind ; of a soul tossing to and fro in a moral 
 and spiritual agony, which overmastered the sense of all 
 bodily torture, of all material and domestic losses ; a soul 
 despairing, doubting, questioning, appealing, yet holding fast 
 in the darkness to its God, and finding at last, not indeed 
 a full solution to all life's riddles, yet peace and reconcili- 
 ation with the God whose power it had acknowledged, but 
 whose goodness and whose justice it had not shrunk for a 
 time from boldly questioning. 
 
 I had reason to believe that some of those who took part 
 in those weekly meetings shared with him who spoke to 
 them in the absorbing interest of a portion of sacred hte- 
 rature which, it is scarcely too much to say, has lain till 
 almost within the present generation — I hardly dare say 
 how long or how generally — almost practically unexplored 
 by the ordinary reader. 
 
 It was suggested t^iie^t the close of those meetings, 
 to undertake on the next occasion a more difficult, a less 
 obviously instructive, in some ways, I fear, a less attrac- 
 tive, task — that of attempting to interest a congregation 
 like the present in the contents and history of the Book of 
 Ecclesiastes. 
 
 I shall not hesitate to state at once the reasons which 
 made me for some time shrink from, and even postpone, the 
 attempt. 
 
 In the first place, the study of the Book is beset with 
 special difficulties, other and in some respects far greater 
 difficulties than those which cross the path, and tax the judg- 
 ment, of the reader of the Book of Job. Whatever may be 
 the occasional obscurities of portions of that book, its chief 
 current of thought runs, in the main, clear and transparent. 
 In Ecclesiastes the case is quite different. The book is in 
 many respects — not in one but in many — an enigma. It is not 
 
4 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [r. 
 
 only that some of the most important verses — sometimes just 
 j^ «^ those on which we would lay our hands as containing at last the 
 
 IT ^is* surest indications of its true aim, and of its highest and most 
 
 momentous teaching — are written in a language which is, to 
 us, so obscure that we dare not rely absolutely on the meaning 
 which we would fain attach to them. We feel like those who, 
 toiling up some Alpine height, either see the pathway sud- 
 denly disappear, or must rest their feet on a support that they 
 feel may give way suddenly beneath them. This is a difficulty 
 which it shares in some, though in a far less, degree, with some 
 of the most striking portions of the Book of Job. But quite 
 apart from these, and from other difficulties, in which I yet 
 hope to interest you, two problems meet us at its very 
 threshold, which, in treating the Book of Job, we can in one 
 case easily answer, in the other cheerfully put aside. In the 
 first place, it is not merely the obscurity of this or that verse 
 which we find baffle us in reading Ecclesiastes ; but when we 
 ask the question which seems the first and most important of 
 
 , / K^ V .all questions, viz. what is the main de sign and puripos e of the 
 /-y r^'^'oook, we are at once bewilderedD}an^multiplicity of answers. 
 ^ To some it has presented itself as merely the sad outpouring 
 
 of the deep melancholy of a world-weary monarch, sated 
 with all that life can offer. Others have found in it ' a peni- 
 tential dirge; ' the sad confession and recantation of a re- 
 pentant Solomon, reconciled at last to the God whom he had 
 forgotten. There are not a few who will tell you something 
 quite different. They will confidently assure you that its main 
 object was to prepare the way for Christ, by expressly teach- 
 ing the doctrine of a future life, and of a judgment beyond the 
 grave. A Christian Father, St. Jerome, was followed by an 
 army of commentators, who read in it a discourse on the 
 blessedness of an ascetic, and even of a monastic, life. Others, 
 on the other hand, will give you a very different answer; they 
 will tell you not merely that it contains a protest against an 
 enervating asceticism, but that it breathes throughout the spirit 
 
I.] Introduciory. 5 
 
 of the merest scepticism, or of utter indifferentism, or of 
 simple epicureanism ; or that its real undertone is that of a 
 cynical materialism, or of a gloomy fatalism, or of a still 
 darker pessimism ; they will absolutely deny its having any 
 claim to rank as a religious book at all , still less to take its 
 place in the most sacred of all books. Again, while some tell 
 us that it is a genuine record of the age of Solomon, others see 
 in it a philosophical treatise of centuries later, saturated with 
 Greek thought. To some it is a political pamphlet ; a satire, 
 almost a lampoon, on some Eastern government; to others a 
 handbook for courtiers ; with some it ranks as a systematic 
 treatise ; with others as a drama, or dialogue, in which two or 
 more voices answer and refute each other; to others it seems 
 a collection, put together almost at random, of various say- 
 ings; to others a strange soliloquy, full of cross currents and 
 conflicting eddies, now steeped in sadness, now commend- 
 ing enjoyment, now pointing to the reign of law, now 
 asserting the supremacy of mere chance, preaching now a 
 kosmos, now a chaos. 
 
 Need I go on ? I have said enough to show you that any 
 discussion of the contents of the book is beset at its very 
 commencement with serious difficulties. I could not ask an 
 intelligent listener to come here, and yet pass by in silence 
 questions on the view that we are to take of which our 
 whole conception of the character of the book must turn. 
 
 And there is at least one further question, already indicated, 
 to which it will be impossible for us to close our eyes. 
 
 JThe a^ithnrshipj or rath(^r t he age, of t he Book of Job is a 
 question of exceeding interest. But it is one on which, in the 
 entire absence of any direct evidence, all reasonable Christians 
 will be prepared to argue dispassionately, and to feel them- 
 selves at entire liberty to accept any view that may commend 
 itself to their thoughtful judgment. They will listen with 
 impartial calmness to those who place its composition in the 
 early days of Moses, or even earlier still, and to those who 
 
5 Lectures on E celestas tes. [i. 
 
 would bring it down to the days of the captivity of Judah, and 
 the apparent shipwreck of the national hopes. But with this 
 book the case is entirely different. We have, on the one 
 hand, the apparently clear and precise statement of the book 
 itself, ascribing the authorship to King Solomon. We have 
 also the fact that this statement was accepted by the con- 
 cordant voices of Jewish Rabbis and Christian Fathers, I had 
 almost said by the unanimous verdict of the Jewish and of the 
 Christian Church, and was absolutely unquestioned till, at all 
 events, the period of the Reformation. On the other hand, the 
 modern student is called on to consider the value and weight 
 of arguments enforced by the learning and authority of the vast 
 majority of the great Hebraists of the last two generations. 
 These tend to show that these chapters are of far later date, 
 were placed, like the Book of Wisdom — also generally attri- 
 buted to Solomon — for very natural reasons in the mouth 
 of the master of Hebrew wisdom ; hnt that their style, their 
 
 substance, their social, polit ical, and reli gious allusions, their 
 
 v ery texture and fabric jjje-absolutel^ jrreconcileable w ith 
 eithe r the person or the age of^jag^juoloiBon ]_ and tha^hey 
 form one of the latest portions, if not the ver y latest, of the 
 He brew canon. , 
 
 You will see at once a further reason against an attempt to 
 interest so mixed, so unknown, an audience in so entangled 
 and thorny a question. It was like asking you to tread a fiery 
 soil, whose slumbering ashes might burst out in bitter contro- 
 versy. And it was also one on which any who spoke at all 
 would rightly wish to speak with a well-matured conviction ; 
 neither to embrace heedlessly what was new, nor to cling 
 blindly to what was old. 
 
 But it was not only the difficulties of the book that made 
 me hesitate. I feared also that I should find its discussion 
 far less instructive than that of that other book. I say 
 less instructive for this reason. The teaching, the practical 
 teaching, of the Book of Job, is one which the Christian teacher 
 
I.] Introductory. 7 
 
 may gladly welcome for himself, and commend most earnestly 
 to his hearers. The picture which we have there of God's 
 love and tenderness for the afflicted soul — of His forbearance 
 towards doubt, despair, reproaches, questioning — of the 
 fatherly love and goodness that lie behind the most searching 
 affliction, the thickest clouds and deepest darkness of life — is a 
 lesson which will never grow old, till all tears are wiped from 
 all eyes, till ' the morning breaks and the shadows flee away.' 
 Ye have heard, says St. James ^, of the patience of Job, and have 
 seen the end of the Lord^ that the Lord is very pitiful and of 
 tender mercy. It is a lesson that is not displaced, but 
 illuminated, by all the teaching of Jesus. But the single- 
 minded reader of the Book of Ecclesiastes, he who will 
 allow that book to speak for itself, and does not read other 
 meanings into almost every verse, must Jeel at^eyery step that^_ 
 he is brea thing a differentjjjmosphere from th at of the^ teaching 
 oF the Gnsppls. He may quote a striking warning here, find 
 a wholesome lesson there. He may lay his hand on words, 
 now of far-seeing prudential wisdom, now of keen insight into 
 human nature. He may refuse to surrender this strange 
 Preacher, royal or discrowned, to rival and unchristian 
 schools, to the sensualist, to the fatalist, to the materialistic 
 pessimist, to the easy-going worldling, who claim him for 
 their own. He will find, in even the lowest and most 
 depressed and depressing tones of ' the still sad music ' which 
 he makes, voices that are not their voices, notes which they 
 never reach. But he will feel, for all this, that a great gulf 
 separates his teaching from that of Him who breathed a 
 quickening spirit into all human life, who offered to every 
 child of Adam, not the lesson, 'Vanity of vanities, all is 
 vanity,' but fresh interests, new motives for activity, new- 
 spheres of work, new hopes, new aims. The teaching which 
 it off"ers will be, must be, if not wholly, yet very largely, 
 a teaching by contrast. 
 
8 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. ]\, 
 
 And, lastly, I feared that the study of the book might prove 
 less interesting and less attractive to those who were invited 
 to join in it. I felt this, not only on the grounds already 
 stated, the difficult and complex questions that beset its 
 discussion, the riddle that the book itself presents, the riddles 
 that encompass it. These very questions and perplexities 
 have, I know, an interest of their own. But I felt it on other 
 grounds. The book has no doubt exercised a strange spell 
 over certain minds. The modern satirist has found in its 
 sad refrain, ' Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,' words to point 
 the nakedness and hollowness of much that seems most im- 
 posing and most brilliant in the world around us. Its feebler 
 echo finds a strange place here on the walls of a Christian 
 church, in a memorial to the dead^ Another denizen of 
 Poets' Corner embodied his interpretation of its substance 
 in an elaborate and forgotten poem^. But in the main, 
 am I not right in saying that those who come here, those 
 to whom life comes home with all its press of duties, its 
 warmth of affection and its difficulties, cares, problems, 
 sorrows, and interests, do not care to come here for lessons 
 of mere disillusion ? These they can find elsewhere. They 
 ask for something more sustaining, more satisfying, more 
 upholding; something that will sweeten what is bitter^ njjfe, 
 not expose— its-bit terne s s -; that will give substance to what 
 seems hollow, not ring changes on its hollowness. It is not 
 the ' weary ' only and the ' heavy-laden ' who ' come for rest 
 to their souls' to a place like this. We all shrink from a 
 view of life, from dwelling here at least on a view of life, that 
 seems to rob that life of all its interest, its dignity, its noble- 
 ness, to paralyse its activity, to stifle its enthusiasm, to re- 
 move from it all hope of progress to a higher and purer ideal. 
 
 * ' Life is a jest, and all things shew it ; 
 
 I thought so once, and now I know it.' 
 
 Inscription on Gay's monument in Poets' Corner. 
 
 * • Solomon, or the Vanity of the World,' by Matthew Prior. 
 
I.] Introductory. 9 
 
 And lastly, for many of the elements that give such interest 
 and such colour to even the long and, in some sense, mono- 
 tonous chapters of the Book of Job, we shall look here in 
 vain. The touching story, the fire, the agony, the revulsion 
 from calmness to passion, the bitter pleading, the cries, the 
 tumult, will be all wanting. For the glimpses into the secrets 
 of a real but far-off life, those traces of an early world and 
 half-settled, or almost primeval stage, for the splendour of the 
 pictures of nature, animate and inanimate, which form the 
 background of that long strange drama, we shall look in 
 vain. AH here is calm and measured ; the face of the 
 speaker is pale and still; he has no narrative to set before 
 us \ the stream of feeling runs at times very deep and full, 
 but silently and noiselessly. A dreary sense of the miseries 
 and worthlessness of human life broods around us as we 
 read ; haunts us perhaps as with his accents in our ears we 
 sweep past the leagues of habitations that spread around 
 this vast metropolis. There is poetry, but it is the poetry, if 
 not of despair, of despondency, of decay, and gloom. There 
 is cheerfulness, but it is not that of joyous hopefulness or 
 gladsome faith, but of a forced and grim acquiescence in the 
 irresistible doom of humanity. 
 
 Yet for all this, in spite of the undeniable difficulties of the 
 book — in spite of its inadequate and far from Christian 
 teaching — in spite also of the apparently uninviting nature 
 of its contents — I feel convinced of the inherent and undying 
 interest of the questions which it will suggest to us. I am 
 inclined to hope that those who will join me, so far as pos- 
 sible, in its study, will agree with me that it is well worth our 
 study. We shall find, I think, that even in its saddest, most 
 despairing accents, even in what we might call its most repel- 
 lent aspect, there is something eminently, pre-eminently, 
 human ; that it touches chords which at one time or another 
 have found an answering fibre within us all. For it points at 
 every turn to questions that, even now, come home, and very 
 
Id Lectures oji E celestas fes. [i. 
 
 nearly home, to the human heart ; to a wider range, it may 
 be, than are stirred even by the majestic eloquence of that 
 other book. If you turn with any lack of interest from its 
 study, I believe that the fault will lie not so much in the 
 obscurity or dulness of its chapters, as in the incapacity of 
 your guide. 
 
 May I now add a few words on the position which, apart 
 from their special contents, this book and that to which 
 I have already referred hold in our English Bibles ? 
 
 The ordinary reader of the Old Testament will find it easy 
 to make, to a certain extent, a classification of the different 
 books which form its contents. He will notice at once that 
 the first five books — commonly called the Pentateuch, or the 
 Books of Moses, or the Law — are followed by a long series 
 of historical and narrative books, in which the story of 
 the Jewish race is brought down from the death of Moses to 
 the period that followed the return from the Babylonian 
 captivity. They include a kind of appendix, so to speak, 
 in the Book of Esther. Now, if he passes on at once to 
 the concluding portion of the Old Testament, he will find 
 that it consists entirely of the writings of seventeen Prophets, 
 or inspired teachers and preachers, of the Jewish nation ; and 
 that these are arranged, partly in chronological order, but 
 partly also, as is the case with St. Paul's Epistles, in that of 
 their relative length and importance. They begin with 
 Isaiah, they end with the latest in time of all the Prophets, 
 with Malachi. So far the classification, though quite different 
 from that current among ancient and modern Jews, is obvious 
 and simple. The Pentateuch, and the Histories, on the one 
 side of the volume ; the Prophets on the other. 
 
 But between these two portions, come five books, which do 
 not so readily lend themselves to any one classification or 
 title. 
 
 First in our own version, first also in that Greek transla- 
 tion which, we must remember, took the place of the Hebrew 
 
I.] Introductory. ii 
 
 Bible with the enormous majority of the early converts to 
 Christianity ; first also in the Vulgate, or Latin Translation, 
 which was for centuries the one form in which the Bible was 
 accessible to the mass of Western Christendom, — first also 
 in the great translation of Luther, which formed such an 
 epoch in the religion, language, and history of Germany- 
 comes the Book of Job. It was placed there no doubt in defer- 
 ence to a received, if questionable, tradition of its extreme 
 antiquity, which gave it precedence in the Syriac Version 
 over all but the Books of Moses. Of the contents of this 
 great and sacred poem — for poem you will remember, with 
 the exception of its two opening and its one closing chapters, 
 it is throughout — I need say nothing more. I will only re- 
 mind you that it deals with the same terrible problem, the 
 apparent want of righteousness in the government of the 
 world, that prompts the saddest passages in the book which 
 we are about to study. Nor need I describe to you the 
 book which follows ; that collection of Psalms, in which we 
 can study the manifold outpouring of the human spirit in its 
 communings with the Spirit of God, from the days of the 
 Poet King to a far later age. 
 
 Immediately after these two totally different embodiments 
 of the very highest flight of inspired human poetry — the one 
 the Book of Job, so far like the Book of Ecclesiastes, that it 
 is almost a Gentile poem, with scarcely a single allusion to 
 the history, or the scenery, or the associations of the Holy 
 Land, the other saturated with the distinctive national life of the 
 singers of Israel — come three books : Proverbs, Ecclesiastes^ 
 and the Song of_ Solomon^_They are profoundly different in 
 many points from each other, but they are alike in this, that 
 they each^lainij directly _or„indirectly, the .authorship of 
 , SnloTnon, who is Stated by some Jewish authorities to have 
 written the last in his youth ; the Proverbs in his wise matu- 
 rity ; the book on which I am now to speak to you in his 
 dreary and disillusionised old age. 
 
12 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [i. 
 
 Of the other two of these books I need say little. You will 
 all be aware that, taken in its first and literal sense, the Song 
 of Solomon is not a religious poem at all. It lends itself 
 readily enough to pious and mystical and allegorical ap- 
 plications; and in this manner has been largely used for 
 ages alike by Jewish and Christian writers. But the student 
 who looks merely to the most obvious meaning of verse after 
 verse, will find borne in upon him, perhaps first of all, the 
 recognition — shall I say the thankful recognition? — of the 
 fact, that even in the Sacred Canon there is room, side by 
 side with the most spiritual yearnings of the Psalmist, for 
 the fervent description of natural affection, room also for 
 the simple genuine sentiment of delight in nature, for the 
 singing of birds and the voice of the turtle, for the green 
 fruit on the fig-tree, and the scent of the early vine tendrils^. 
 Nor need I say more than one word on the Book of Proverbs. 
 It deserves, and should receive, a separate treatment of its own. 
 I will only remind you that both in the longer addresses 
 which form its opening ten chapters, and in the short anti- 
 thetical, well balanced, aphorisms or proverbs, couched almost 
 always in double lines or couplets, which follow ; and again 
 in its personification and glorification of Wisdom as opposed 
 to Folly — as also in its total absence of any local colour or 
 national allusions — it has not a little in common with the 
 wholly different book on which I purpose to speak to you. 
 
 To that book, and to some of the questions connected with 
 its design, meaning, and history, I will ask your undivided 
 attention next time. I have little doubt, as I have said 
 already, in spite of the doubts and difficulties that lie couched 
 at the very portal, and the patches of obscurity and darkness 
 through which we must feel our way, that when we have once 
 passed within its precincts, we shall find much to interest 
 and impress, and something to aid us. Those dreary 
 sentiments, those disjointed proverbs, those hollow wraiths 
 ^ Stanley's Jewish Historj^, vol. ii. p. 241. 
 
I.] Introductory. 13 
 
 of unavailing consolation, those wearisome repetitions, those 
 uninteUigible utterances, those terrible pictures of human 
 destinies, those snatches of startling and, as it might seem, 
 wholly irreligious teaching, those ' hard sayings,' will gather 
 a fresh interest as we try to track them through their many 
 windings to their true sense and actual teaching. We shall see 
 in them, if we do so faithfully, no body of Christian doctrine 
 wrapped up in an unchristian form, but that which is at all 
 times one of the most moving of all spectacles — the human 
 spirit led to face in hours of gloom its relations towards the 
 world and towards its God — struggling with the same problems 
 that vex our souls, and feeling its way through a night of 
 darkness to some measure at least of light and knowledge. 
 We shall feel that we are listening to one of those of whom our 
 Saviour said that 'they desired to see the things which we see, 
 and did not see them.' 
 
 [November 8, 1884.] 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 The Authorship and Age of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 I SPOKE last week of some of the difficult — the exceedingly 
 difficult, if exceedingly interesting — questions which would 
 be forced on our attention before we could enter on any 
 careful and continuous study of the Book of Ecclesiastes. 
 These difficulties will meet us at every step, and you will 
 forgive me if I ask you to look them with me in the face ; 
 not to mask them, as it were, and so pass on. Tli£ _-^£ry- 
 tit1e_£i£lhe book is obsc ure^ The Greek word, ' Ecclesiastes,' 
 borrowed from the oldest translation of the Old Testament, 
 is rendered in our version, under the guidance of Luther, by 
 the English word, ' the Preacher,' and in those parts of the 
 body of the book where it recurs presents itself always in this 
 form. How far the Greek word itself admits of this transla- 
 tion is questionable, and — what is more important still — the 
 meaning of the Hebrew word which that Greek word 
 represents is much disputed. _' Preacher.' ' Ecclesia§t£§,' 
 ' Koheleth ' — a mist hangs round all these forms of its title. 
 The^mithorship too of the book, and its date, are questions 
 on which, as we shall see, competent critics come to the 
 most conflicting conclusions. Again, its very form is con- 
 tested. Is it prose or poetry .? ' Genuine poetry,' says one 
 of the very greatest of Hebrew scholars \- ' pure prose, rising 
 at times into poetry,' say, more plausibly at least, others of 
 scarcely less authority. And again, is it, whether prose or 
 poetry, a dramatic discussion, like the ' Two Voices ' of our 
 own poet ? Or is it a medley of conflicting, loosely ordered, 
 
 ' Ewald, Kohelet, 1837. 
 
11.] Authorship and Age. 15 
 
 thoughts which Providence, or accident, has preserved ? Or 
 is it a collection — deliberately made — of scattered sayings 
 of wisdom ? Or a somewhat incoherent, if inspired, medita- 
 tion on human life ? Or is it a systematic and philosophical 
 treatise on the Supreme Good? or a Christian sermon under a 
 thin disguise ? 
 
 On all these points there is, as I reminded you last week, 
 the greatest possible divergence of opinion and of judgment. 
 And when we come to the question of questions , the true 
 substance, and real aim and teaching, of the book, the discord, 
 as I also reminded you, is even more baffling. Some views, 
 current in quite modern literature, I have already indicated. 
 The author, w e have been lately told o n high authority ^,Js a 
 sceptic , a sceptic pure and simple, who questions everything, 
 and while nominally letting drop a few respectful and 
 traditional phrases as to the existence and power of God, 
 utterly disbelieves in His control of, or His care for, human 
 affairs; has no belief at all in a future life ; and questions 
 these things, not with the passionate pleading of the Psalmist 
 or of Job, but quite calmly : not grovelling in the dust, not 
 crying for the light ; but ju st looking (it is said) at the riddles 
 of life, 'shrugging his shoulders,' and saying there is no. 
 solution. Vanitas vanitatum. ' All is vanity.' What then 
 is, in this view, his practical teaching ? It is that, we are 
 told, of a cultivated Epicurean, who discourages all zeal on 
 one side, all excess on the other. Be not righteous over 
 much, he says, in so many words, neither be over much 
 wicked"^. He is, in the eyes of a countryman of Talleyrand, 
 a very Talleyrand transferred from the sphere of Diplomacy 
 to that of Religion, and warning us against zeal above all 
 things. Do not waste time on ideals. Better, he says in 
 so many words, the sight of the eyes than the wandering of 
 desire^. It is vain to set yourself to do battle with the wrongs 
 of life. That which is crooked, he warns us, cannot be 
 
 ^ Renan, I'Ecclesiaste, 1882. * vii. 16, 17. ' vi. 9. 
 
1 5 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ii. 
 
 made straighf^. Besides, ivho knoweth, he asks, what is 
 good /or man in his vain life which he spendeih as a shadow"' ? 
 The evils of life are incurable — make the best of them. 
 Government is rotten to the core ; you will see, he says, 
 justice and judgment perverted ; but what then ? — on the 
 side of the oppressors^ he urges, is power ^. Society is corrupt 
 throughout, Folly is set in great dignity* ; Bread is not 
 to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding ^. But then 
 kings, who are the crown and summit of this organized 
 rottenness and corruption, are, he sees, very powerful beings. 
 Who may, he asks in so many words, who may say unto them, 
 what doest thou ^ ? Curse not the king, therefore, even in thy 
 thought ; nor the rich even in thy chamber'' . You cannot fore- 
 see or affect the future; mayi knoweth not that which shall be^. 
 Old age, if you live to it, is mere life in death ; the grave will 
 end all. The dead, he says, know not anything. Fame, too, 
 is a mere illusion : The memory of them is forgotten ^ What 
 then ? Take freely that one gift of which you can be sure, 
 the enjoyment of the moment ; not the foolish excess which 
 will defeat its own end, not the devotion of your life to the 
 constant pursuit of pleasure, which experience has taught me, 
 the Wise Man, will end in disappointment, but the moderate 
 enjoyment of that which is within your reach. 
 
 And this, we are confidently told, is the whole teaching of 
 the book. 
 
 But to others the preacher goes even beyond this. He 
 may be in one sense a Fatalist , a Sceptic , an Epicurea n ; but 
 these things lie on the surface. He is at heart something 
 more than either. He is, so far as was possible in the age 
 in which he lived, what in modern phrase we should call a 
 professed and unflinching pessimist . By this we mean what .? 
 Just this, that he holds — let us state it clearly — that human 
 existence is in itself, as compared with non-existence, a pure 
 
 ^ vii. 13. ^ vi. 12. 2 iv. I. * X. 6. ^ ix. 11. 
 
 * viii. 4. "^ X. 20. * viii. 7. * ix. 5. 
 
II.] Authorship and Age. ' 17 
 
 evil. He is in entire sympathy with those who even now 
 assert that the highest type with which we are acquainted of 
 that mysterious entity which we call life, viz. the human 
 organism as seen in civilized and cultivated man, is neces- 
 sarily burdened with a weight of pain in full proportion to its 
 complexity and development. The higher, therefore, that type 
 rises in the scale of being, the sadder is its lot ; the greater 
 and more pressing the consciousness of a growing want of 
 correspondence between itself and the conditions under 
 which it has to work out its existence, between, in the phrase 
 of to-day, ' the organism and its environment.' He echoes, 
 we are told, or anticipates almost precisely, the very words 
 of the Greek poet, that fiol to be born at all is best 0/ all, but 
 failing this, that death is better than life^. And this is no 
 passing cry, like those wrung from Job by piercing agony : 
 such as, ' Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.' 
 No ! it is the slowly formed and deliberate judgment of one 
 who is represented as having coldly sounded the depths 
 of philosophical enquiry, and watched with careful eyes the 
 whole round of human experience. Therefore I hated life "^j 
 he says as the result, and again, / praised the dead that are 
 already dead more than the living which are yet alive ^. And 
 again, the day of death is better than the day of ones birth*. 
 It is an evil world, he tells us ; madness is in mens hearts 
 while they live, aiid after that they go to the dead ^ ; or again, 
 there is one event, one end, to all, to the righteous and to the 
 wicked^. It may be well to find, for those who can accept 
 them, some temporary alleviations for the malady of life in 
 such moderate enjoyment as the hour may bring. But the 
 only true cure is death, and the one lesson impressed on 
 him by the spectacle of nature and by the calm study of life 
 is the hollowness of all things — the bankruptcy of human 
 
 ' iv. 2, 3 ; Soph. aid. Col. 1225. ^ ii. 17. ' iv. 2. 
 
 * vii. I. <> ix. 3. ^ ix. 2. 
 
 C 
 
1 8 Lectures on Ecclesiastcs. [ii. 
 
 hopes, and the worthlessness of all man's aspirations, Vaniias 
 vanitatum — all indeed is vanity. 
 
 Such are the views which have been, which are, taken by 
 no mean students of the book. I need hardly say that if 
 they are correct, if we have nothing to say against them 
 or beyond them ; if they are the last word, the final verdict of 
 a fair and scientific criticism, then we may be well amazed at 
 finding in our Bibles a book which not only makes faith and 
 religion things absolutely impossible, but robs human life of 
 every aim, and takes away from it every ground on which 
 we can build any stable morality. In its own sad words, ' All 
 indeed is vanity.' For the Bible, we must remember is 
 emphatically a religious book. It is this, if it is anything at 
 all. It is not placed in our hands to teach us philosophy, or 
 science, or even history in itself It deals with one subject, 
 the relation of man to God and of God to man. What 
 place is there in such a book for a writer who treats all such 
 relations as an empty dream ? 
 
 I have indicated some of the questions, the somewhat 
 startling questions, it may seem, into which the study of this 
 book must lead us. Let me speak now of the vexed question 
 of its authorship, and of the age in which it saw the light. 
 You will understand me if I decline to pass on and leave 
 the subject untouched. 
 
 Who is this ' Preacher,' if Preacher we may call him, whose 
 words have found such strange and manifold interpretations.'' 
 
 The answer will at first sight seem obvious. Though 
 Solomon is not mentioned by name, as he is in the opening 
 words of the Book of Proverbs and of the Song of Songs, 
 though indeed the direct mention of his name seems carefully 
 avoided, yet he is clearly indicated by the words of the first 
 verse of chapter i, in which the writer speaks of himself as 
 the son of David, and by verse 2, in which he adds, that he 
 7vas king over Israel in Jerusalem ; as also by the language of 
 verse 16, and again of chapter ii, in which he speaks of his 
 
II.] Authorship and Age. 19 
 
 wisdom and his wealth as having surpassed those of all his 
 predecessors, strange as the expression doubtless is, of all 
 that zvere hfore me in Jerusalem^. Whatever the cause of 
 the suppression of the name, the person indicated is clearly 
 that of Solomon. 
 
 And in addition to this, the statement, direct or indirect, of 
 the book itself, we have the unanimous acceptance of the 
 authorship of Solomon by all Hebrew and all Christian 
 writers down to a comparatively recent period. There is, no 
 doubt, evidence that, so late as the close of the first century 
 after the Christian era, there was some hesitation in the 
 minds of the leaders of the Jewish Church, if not as to the 
 admission of the book to what we call the sacred canon, yet 
 certainly as to ranking it at all on a level with its most 
 honoured portions. St. Jerome, again, tells us that the Jews 
 of his day were keenly offended at the tone of its teaching. 
 More than one of the great Jewish writers has put on record 
 the offence caused him by isolated verses. It is quite true 
 also that no portion of the book is alluded to or quoted, 
 either in the New Testament or by the earliest writers of 
 the Christian Church. But of any doubts as to its being a 
 genuine work of Solomon we hear nothing. And it is urged 
 that to call in question its authorship, and to refer its com- 
 position to a later date, is simply to brand it as the work 
 of a forger; it is to substitute for Solomon an untruthful 
 personator, pretending at the very threshold that his work is 
 something which it is not; snatching, in fact, at a great name, 
 in order to give his utterances an influence which they would 
 not of themselves obtain. Nay, some writers go much 
 further than this. We have no right, they tell us, to enter on 
 such a question. The critical study of the Bible is more than 
 permissible, they say, is useful, so long as it confines itself to 
 clearing away difficulties and elucidating the sacred text. But 
 the moment that it takes upon itself to question by its own 
 
 ' ii. 7, 9- 
 c 2 
 
20 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [il. 
 
 light any statement whatever made in Holy Scripture, it 
 becomes at once a purely destructive agency, antagonistic 
 and fatal to all faith. You can no more trust such critics, we 
 are told, than you could trust a dishonest workman, who, when 
 employed to clean and scour a sea-going ship, bored holes 
 through her ribs and did his best to scuttle her. That 
 Solomon wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes is, it is urged, a fact 
 plainly and incontestably revealed on the authority of God's 
 Word. If the statement suggests difficulties or doubts, they 
 are either to be regarded as trials of our faith, or as the 
 suggestions of fanciful and malignant critics. To treat them 
 seriously is to involve ourselves in questions of incalculable 
 issue ; and to look on the authorship of this book as an open 
 question tends directly to sap the very foundations, not of 
 the Hebrew Scriptures only, but of the Christian religion^ 
 
 I have put the view which I have stated in the strongest 
 light possible, using the very language of its foremost up- 
 holders. I may say at once that I entirely dissent from it ; 
 nay, that I think its whole tone one against which Christians 
 who value truth themselves, and feel sympathy with everyone 
 to whom truth is dear, are bound emphatically to protest. 
 The same arguments, fairly carried out in another direction, 
 would have kept Galileo in his prison, consigned, it may be, 
 Newton to the stake. The truths on which we Christians 
 rest in Hfe and death are not bound up with these questions 
 of the authorship, or the age, of the work which we are about 
 to study. We find men to whom these truths are incon- 
 ceivably dear, men who are the very foremost champions of 
 the essential truths of the Gospel against those who dispute 
 them, fully agreeing with their adversaries, and with each 
 other, that it is impossible that this book, whose canonicity 
 they fully admit, was written by Solomon, or for centuries 
 later. We find one after another of the greatest Hebrew 
 scholars of the last two generations — of the age, remember, 
 ^ The Authorship of Ecclesiastes. Macmillan & Co., 1880. 
 
II.] Authorship and Age. 21 
 
 at which such questions have received their first full dis- 
 cussion — coming to the same conclusion. Can we refuse to 
 give their arguments respectful consideration? 
 
 In the first place, such men repudiate at once the word 
 ' forgery ' as applied to the question of authorship. The 
 book, they say, is not a forgery, any more than certain books 
 of ancient authors, such as Plato or Cicero, or of modern 
 poets, deserve the name. It is a dramatic personation by 
 one who, born in a dark and gloomy hour of his nation's 
 existence, and moved and stirred by a voice within to put 
 before his countrymen certain views of the world and of life, 
 chose the title of the king, around whose memory clustered 
 innumerable associations as the great sage and philosopher 
 of the Hebrew race ; one whose name had become the 
 very type of human wisdom combined with human sadness 
 and frailty. The very form, it is added, in which his 
 memory, so sad on one side, so glorious on the other, is 
 evoked from the darkness of the past, points to a dramatic 
 rather than historical use. His name is avoided, and he 
 speaks in the words, not ' I a?n King,' as the actual Solomon 
 of the Book of Kings must necessarily have done if writing 
 in his life-time, but rather as a spirit called up from the world 
 of shades, and speaking centuries after his decease. I zvas 
 king, he says, over Israel ; the phrase itself, in spite of all 
 attempts to explain it, points rather to the traditions which 
 spoke of Solomon as stripped by the Evil One of his royal 
 dignity, robbed of his mystical ring, and wandering from 
 place to place a discrowned and needy vagrant, with the sad 
 cry, / was king i?i Jerusalem, than to the recorded facts of 
 sacred history. It is added that the scaffolding of the age of 
 Solomon is only erected at the entrance of the work. It 
 disappears wholly before the end of the second chapter, and 
 we pass erelong into another atmosphere — an age of satraps 
 and spies, and bad government, and formal religion, and 
 incipient Pharisaism, and incipient asceticism ; an age of 
 
23 Lectures on Ecclesiastcs. [ii. 
 
 general misery, oppression, and corruption. Indeed, the 
 whole_ a rgume nt as to the authorship of Snin mnn Hqa jj^t in 
 a phrase here, or a word there, but in lhe_iYliole 4€xtiire~Q£.^ 
 the_ book. 
 
 There is, first, that on which it is impossible for us here to 
 form or pronounce any independent opinion at all. The 
 JgLBg^ilgg is sajd_to^be^satupj£jd_^yjtlLjg'ter Hebrew. If it is 
 not as different from that of the older writers, as e.g. the Eng- 
 lish of Cowper from that of Chaucer, yet the difference is said 
 to be one quite similar in kind. If, says a great authority, a 
 Christian Hebraist of unimpeached orthodoxy, ' if the book 
 of Ecclesiastcs was written in the age of Solomon, there is ?io 
 history of the Hehreiv language \' 
 
 Such statements are, I need not say, of great weight. Their 
 weight, of course, depends upon their accuracy ; and they are 
 questioned and even strongly denied. Yet I am bound to 
 say that those who question or deny them are, so far as I can 
 ascertain, men who look with a dismay, which I for one do 
 not for one moment share, at the possible result or results of 
 holding the author to be one of a far later date. Independent 
 students — those who are both competent and anxious to 
 give an opinion on language as such, with no ulterior view, 
 looking, as you and I would do, to truth and truth only — 
 seem to me to be more and m ore coming to one conclusion; 
 and I have nowhere f ound an y suggesTIon that the whole 
 
 tf'vfj-miijinspH originally in a mnre nndent,ioigi_of^th^ 
 
 Hebrew tongue, bears traces of having been recast and 
 
 modernised. 
 
 But behind the question of language, there lies another 
 argument into which you and I can entirely enter, and 
 which, I confess, seems to me to be of the greatest possible 
 weight and_ jnt£i£sL— Xet us forget entirely the style of the 
 lebrew in the original text, its inflexions, structure, syntax, 
 on which scarcely more than one or two here, perhaps, are 
 
 ^ Delitzsch. 
 
II.] Authorship and Age. 23 
 
 competent to judge. Let us consider something else, its , 
 contents , its to ne, the local colouring, the ligh ts and shades /aw'TX^ 
 of the age at which he speaks, _the scenery which we see in ^ 
 the backgroHTiTt^^l Iehind the speaker as weJLslfiiL t o him. 
 
 What shall we see ? Weariness, satiety, hatred of life, a 
 low estimate of his fellow-men and fellow-women — a pro- 
 found melancholy. Well ! these are natural enough in a 
 king old before his time, who had tasted all the pleasures of 
 life, and found the after-taste very bitter. Yes, that is 
 possible, no doubt. But it is surely strange that the son of 
 David, he who in his early youth had been so near and dear 
 to his father's God, shou ld have no word to say, not one 
 wor d, as he recounts the story of his life , of h is own early 
 love to God and to his people, a love which comes out so 
 beautifully in tTie BoolTof Kings. / am but a little child, he 
 had said once, and hozv shall I judge this great people^ ? He 
 had asked once not for riches, nor for power, but for wisdom. 
 And you remember the striking words, Because thou hast 
 not asked for thyself long life, nor riches for thyself nor 
 the life of thine enemies .... lo, I have given thee a wise and 
 understanding hearf^. Is it he who in this book holds so 
 cheap the wisdom so freely given, and has no word either of 
 gratitude to the Giver, or of memory or sense that it came 
 from Him? Of re pentance ,_or even of regrgt for his falling. . 
 away, he makes no sign. _ He represents himself as having 
 attained to his marvellous height of wisdom, by his own toil 
 and researches, and this in the deliberate carrying out of a 
 cool and calculating philosophic experiment. Is it too much 
 
 to say that, if it is I'^nlnmnn who «;ppak<;, \\ k q f^nl^m pn who 
 
 has fo rgotten his own ^past life, alike its good side a nd_Jts__ 
 
 ,_evil ? it is no longer Solomon, the righteous judge; nor 
 
 Solomon, the builder and dedicator of the Temple, which he 
 
 does not even enumerate among his great works, and of 
 
 which he will speak as you or I might speak to-day of this or 
 
 ^ I Kings iii. 7, 8, 9. ^ i Kings iii. 11, 12. 
 
24 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. [11. 
 
 of any long-established place of worship. Nor, again, is it 
 Solomon the worshipper, or the sanctioner of the worship, of 
 false Gods. It is one who has forgotten both characters. 
 It_is a Solomon in a state of mental eclipse, una ble to recall 
 the pastin _any colou r but that which the present lendsjt. 
 irSolomon is here at all, it is another Solomon than he 
 whom we find in the sacred record. 
 
 But thi s is only one of many arguments. The Solomon 
 of sacred history ruled, till his death, over a great and 
 prosperous empire. His portrait, as painted there, is not 
 that of an artistic and philosophical builder of stately palaces, 
 as one of many experiments in the process of satisfying the 
 selfish, self-inspecting, cravings of his own restless soul. 
 It is that of a great and statesmanlike ruler of men, the 
 shaper under God of a young nation's destinies. Art and 
 commerce sprang into life at his touch. His people felt the 
 blood of a fresh national life thrill within their veins. Wealth 
 flowed into the land. Silver and gold, we read, were as 
 stones in the streets of Jerusalem. Material prosperity grew, 
 to use a well-known phrase, by leaps and bounds. Foreign 
 potentates sought his alliance. Far-off" lands sent him their 
 
 treasures. Thp piVtnrp \r\ \\\(- 'RonT^ nf King'^ is^__Q^rhaps^ 
 
 the verybrightest pictur e of na tional prospe rity which sacred^ 
 or profane writer has ev e r placed on re cord. Judah and 
 Israel, we read, dwelt safely, every man under his vine and 
 under his fig-tree, from Dan even unto Beersheha, all the days 
 of Solomon ^. We know that there was a reverse side to the 
 picture; that tribal jealousies still existed; that the devout 
 were alienated by the introduction of foreign worship ; that 
 a sumptuous court, and a king's eagerness in pressing on 
 great national works, involved heavy burdens and popular 
 disaff'ection. And we know how the magnificent fabric of 
 his empire broke up, when the great king was hardly cold in 
 his grave. Bu t the picture which the Preacher will dra win 
 ' I Kings iv. 25. 
 
II.] Authorship and Age. 25 
 
 these chapters is one which it is almost impossible to fit into 
 "the age of Solomon. It is unrelieved by a single touch of 
 patriotism, or of national or of kingly feeling of any kind. 
 Kings are spoken of; but it is as powerful personages to be 
 in every way dreaded and propitiated. ,^^altj^is_treated_as_ 
 a regular, necessary, long-established institution. It is appa- 
 rently reg'afded with no very friendly eye. The writer will 
 speak, as it were, under his breath, and in language not 
 always easy to decipher. But he will speak as one who has 
 groaned under the misrule of an Oriental despotism, with its 
 succession of low-born and corrupt favourites ; its spies in 
 every chamber ; its ubiquitous police ; its insecurity of pro- 
 perty and life; its arbitrariness; its shameful luxury; its 
 corrupt and unjust judges. The Solomon of history left 
 behind him the enduring fame of a righteous judge. With all 
 his faults, he imprinted on his nation's heart the ideal of a 
 national and a beneficent sovereign. His race loved to con- 
 nect with his namej he nLaginificentpicture^f-the perfectjCirig 
 which still canstirjnir hearts Jike a trumpet as we^read the 
 72ndPs alm. Could such a Solomon have spoken, as the 
 speaker in this book will speak, with a melancholy resignation, 
 the resignation of calm despair, of the place of judgment being 
 filled by wickedness^ ; of the tears of the oppressed, who had no 
 comforter ^ ; ox of power being always 07i the side of the 
 oppressor ? Would he have spoken of slaves being set on 
 horseback, and princes degraded^ ; recalling some scene out of 
 the 'Arabian Nights,' or the revolutions of a Persian court? 
 Would he have darkly hinted at satrap above satrap *, making 
 appeal for redress useless ? Would he, in short, have written 
 verse after verse of latent satire on some worn-out and 
 corrupt, yet still for the present irresistible system of op- 
 pression ? Was the Turkish administration of yesterday or 
 to-day possible, as a living and present fact, to even the 
 poetic imagination of an actual Solomon ? 
 
 * iii. 16. 2 iv. I. 3 X. 7. * V. 8, 
 
z6 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ii. 
 
 And a gain, was the ques tio n that will recu x_ again and 
 again as w e read these chaptgrs, the quegtioii-of the sad 
 tnequalTties, an d anomalie s; and_mjustices, oLhugian-Iifei^- 
 \ver^~lHese'~melancholy outlooks into human history — this 
 hopeless view of the organization of society and of the 
 /S A government of the world — this recurring abandonment of any 
 
 n •v^'t^ prospect of redress, — were these things natural, _po ssible, in 
 ^^ ffi/iN th e interval between the gl ow:Lng. hQppful..Jrus tful Psalm s of 
 Q/(/^^ ^ 'J~Pavid, an d the zeaj _andJgiY.Qur of Ihe- JIehr£iy_PrQpliets ? 
 Is there room jn_thejjeigni)i Solomon^ for this blank era of 
 profo und a.nd _pajsionless_despaij; ? this forgetfulness of the 
 very existence and position of the Jewish nation ? this indif- 
 ference to its past, this deadness to its future ? Do such 
 problems, we might almost ask, as are dealt with in this 
 book, speak to men, have any meaning to men, in the first 
 heyday of a nation's youth ? above all to the Jewish nation, 
 while still fired with high hopes, and led onward by the felt 
 presence of its God towards the greatness for which it panted ? 
 To me it seems, I confess, impossible to read verse after 
 verse that will come before us without feeling that they have 
 ' - ^ l ittle or no meaning unless w e 1nnk nn tbprn as thf; outcom e 
 
 ^ ^ of a time of suffering and oppression. T hey seem to po int 
 
 'T a/ Steadily to anagewhenj national freedom was g one, national life 
 
 r/-'* extinguished for a time ; the spirit of freedom dead ; the high 
 memories of the past forgotten ; the Messianic hopes not yet 
 rekindled ; when the God of Hosts seemed far removed ; 
 when all around was dark and gloomy ; jn^daySj_it may bej_ _ 
 w hen Persian or Syrian or Egy ptian kings juled over the 
 land of David as a provinc e of their kingd om, and the hopes 
 of Isr ael seemed dead and gone^buried and out of sig ht. 
 
 Then, it might well come to pass that the spirit of some 
 son of Israel was stirred within him — in a time when the 
 writing and the reading of books was, as we see by one of 
 the closing verses \ a familiar thing — to try to reach his 
 
II.] AutJiorsJiip and Age. 27 
 
 people's heart, not by spoken word or the stirring address of 
 a Jewish prophet ; the day of prophecy was over : not by 
 the music of a Psalm ; the Psalmist's harp was silent : not 
 by a great poem like the Book of Job — such poetry had 
 died out of the nation's heart ; but by putting forth in this 
 half-inarticulate and ambig iious form a soliloquy or dis- 
 
 c ourse, call it which you will, b r eathi ng th ^veiy spirit qf_ 
 
 ^hat_j ater age : its ^sadness, its languor^ its passive and 
 0£iental_acc[uiescence, almost lethargy, under suffering. It 
 bears the ataiQEi. from first to last, of dejection, if not of 
 despair. Yet its still unrelinquished, pervading sense of the 
 fear of God as the end of life ; its firm hold of the inherent 
 distinction between right and wrong ; its refusal, in spite of 
 all that seems to cloud the hope, to part with the conviction 
 of a judgment, a righteous judgment, yet to come ; its 
 counsels of activity, patience, cheerfulness, prudence, calm- 
 ness, sympathy with suffering, stand out amidst the wreck 
 and decay of all around. They stand out often in sharp 
 contrast with what seemg_at_times the' prevailing toi;e_ot the 
 book Itself. It is easy to quote, as we shall see, opposite 
 precepts, conflicting views : scepticism and faith, pessimism 
 and optimism, gloom and brightness, despair and hope. 
 There they stand side by side, and we shall unders tand, as we 
 read them, ho w it is tha t, in the enormous literature that haa_ 
 gathe red r ound these few pages .of the Old Testament, there„ 
 is the projoundest disagreement as to their aim and purpose,. 
 We, my friends, will do our best to reach the true meaning 
 of the Preacher's words. We will not attempt to disguise 
 their sombre and despairing side. We will try to realize 
 to the very full the loss of belief in human progress, the 
 eclipse of any sense of a God close at hand to aid, such 
 as nerved the Psalmist, or near at hand to guide, such as 
 fired the Prophet. We will face these things fairly and 
 honestly, not wresting the pl ain meaning qL the -PreacJier^,. 
 words, or fastening on a phrase here, a line there, and saying^_^ 
 
*• 
 28 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. 
 
 be hold we have in him a Preacher, be fore his tijne, of_ 
 Christian doctrines, or an anticipator of modern science, or 
 a professor of Christian theology, or a revealer of the life and 
 Tmmortality ^hich were brought to light by Christ. But we 
 win try, reverently and honestly, to reach the meaning, the 
 real meanin g, of the Preacher ; to catch what higher teaching 
 God's Spirit still kept alive within his heart; and faithfully and 
 heedfully to ask what his place can be in that Sacred Record, 
 to study a fragment of which we have met to-day. 
 
 To Him whose education of our race is revealed in that 
 great Record, to the God of Truth, would we consecrate 
 our efforts. His help and blessing we would seek ! 
 
 [November 15, 18S4.] 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 The Prologue. Chapter I. 2-1 1. 
 
 I SAID enough, when last I spoke here, to indicate the view 
 that will be taken of the authorship and age of the book 
 which we are studying. 
 
 I jhall presume that we have in it a late, perhaps the very 
 latest, portion of t he Old Testament canon ; and that the 
 book was written, not in^thejpalmy days of the empire of 
 Solomon, but at a time when the Jewish people, once so full 
 of aspirations to universal empire, always so intolerant of 
 foreign supremacy, was lying beneath the yoke of Persian or 
 Egyptian or Syrian kings ; when the Holy Land had become 
 a province, or department, ruled by some Eastern satrapj an^ 
 suffering from the rapacity and corruption inherent at all_^ 
 times in such government. 
 
 And I shall presume that at such a time, one, who shared 
 to the^mosTlRFgloom'and^defection'orKis race, was moved 
 to come forward to bear his part in some interchange of^ 
 t hought between his ow n sad_squl and ._those to whom the 
 darkness of that hour was a 'darkness that inight be felt.' 
 I shall assume also that he clothed Jiis words in the person 
 of the great head an d_ representative of Hebrew wisdom, aii3" " 
 I shall glance from time to time at any eyidence that j)oints_ 
 to this.jde!A'. of the. date and^origin of the book. 
 
 And, if this view is at all correct, it will suggest at once 
 some answer to the grave question as to thejgl ace which the 
 book holds i ri_the education and spiritual d&velopment of the 
 human race. The question will come before us again and 
 
 ^A^^-iyU-i 
 
30 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. [iii. 
 
 again as we study its contents. But I would answer at once 
 that i t seems to me to represent_that stage jn the history of 
 di e chosen people when the m oral and spirijual fervour, with 
 which the sons of Abraham had been instinct without a 
 parallel in the his tory of the world, had died out under^_the_ 
 "^stern pressure of overwhelming ad versjly. It was, we may 
 believe, a time when the early and simpler belief that 
 obedience to God's law and outward prosperity must neces- 
 sarily go together, a belief long rudely shaken, had passed 
 away ; \vhen_t he very a go ny w hich jts disturbance had caused, 
 as figured in the passionate cries of Job, had give n place to 
 calm despair ; it is the hour when the prophet's cry, ' Verily, 
 Thou art a God that hidest Thyself^' had become the 
 expression of something more than a momentary pang; 
 when all that Judaism offered, had it been a final dispen- 
 sation, seemed exhausted, and the light that was to shine 
 into the darkness had not yet dawned. Jt is the chill and 
 gloom i n the sick man's chamber before the first breeze of 
 morning stirs, or the first beam^ of^ dawn glimmers in the 
 east. 
 
 Be this as it may, I will now invite you all alike : you who 
 cannot perhaps part with the conviction that we have here 
 the moody voice of the kingly Solomon, anticipating in the 
 full pulse of the nation's youth the gloom and despondency 
 of its sadness and decline ; and you who can accept with me 
 the confessedly modern, but as it seems to me the more 
 probable view, that we have in it the voice of jonie_iaember- 
 of t he Jewish Church, s t irred in. a ^r Jater age to give utter- 
 ance tojhe_thoughtsJJbatAYorked:ffiithin hinijn days of dec a- 
 dence anddecayj^ I will invite you, each and all, to turn to 
 iti~Tnstructive pages, and to study with me, so far as the 
 occasional obscurity of its language will permit, these strange 
 and tangled meditations which paint so well the darker side 
 
 * Isaiah xlv. i;. 
 
III.] The Prologue. Ch. i. 3-ti. 31 
 
 of human life, and the gloom of the individual spirit ; the 
 need, let me add, to both alike of a Consoler and Restorer. 
 
 Let us begin at once with his opening words, Vanity of 
 VANITIES, saith the Preacher, Vanity of vanities : all is 
 VANITY. He strikes at once the key note to a vein of 
 thought, never retracted, never wholly overborne, that will 
 recur again and again as we follow him in his musings. 
 Listen to the stately and solemn accents in which he clothes 
 his thoughts in what we may call the Prologue to his sad 
 soliloquy. He begins in verse 2, Vanity of vanities, saith the 
 Preacher, vanity of vanities : all is vanity. There is his text. 
 What profit hath a man — hath man — of all his labour tvhich 
 he taketh under the snn ? There is man the toiler. Then he 
 looks at man as face to face with nature. Listen to him 
 through the next five verses. O^ie generation passeth away 
 and another generation cometh : but the earth abideth for ever. 
 The snn also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to 
 his place where he arose. The wind- goeth iotvard the south, 
 and turneth about unto the north ; it whirleth about contifiually, 
 and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All 
 the rivers run into the sea ; yet the sea is not full ; unto the 
 place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. 
 All things are full of labour ; man cannot utter it ; the eye is 
 not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled tvith hearing. In 
 the ninth verse he turns to man, as looked on in the light of 
 history. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ; 
 and that which is done is that which shall be done : and there is 
 no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it is 
 said. See, this is neiv ? it hath been already of old time, which 
 was before us. There is no remembraiice of former thiftgs ; 
 neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to 
 come im'th those that shall come after. Such are the lines of 
 profound and unbroken melancholy — of more than melan- 
 choly, of weariness and despair — with which the book opens. 
 Everything on earth, everything without exception, is hollow 
 
33 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [in. 
 
 and empty — man's labour, and man himself, most of all. 
 The sight of nature and the study of history are alike stale, 
 flat, wearisome, and unprofitable. 
 
 Shall we take his words in hand, and say ' such language 
 cannot mean what it says ? ' Shall we set to work to explain 
 it away, and write into each dismal verse some pious senti- 
 ment, or some Christian doctrine } Shall we imagine ourselves 
 by such a process to be doing honour to what we read, by 
 making its language mean something wholly different from, 
 or precisely contrary to, its plain significance .? We turn to 
 commentators, Jewish and Christian, and we find ourselves 
 in quite another atmosphere to that which broods around 
 the speaker. Words have lost their meaning ; sighs are no 
 longer sighs ; despair is no more despair ; the saddest 
 utterances of the human heart have become merely sparkling 
 and ingenious riddles. Our ears are filled with hollow verbi- 
 age, fictitious sorrows, artificial moans, assumed dejection. 
 
 Let me give you at once one or two instances of the 
 manner in which this ' exceeding deep and bitter ' moan 
 has been dealt with for centuries. 
 
 That ' all things ' — all without exception — ' are vanity ' 
 means, we shall be told at once, nothing more than the pious 
 maxim that without God's blessing nothing human will 
 avail. That ' all man's toil beneath the sun is profitless ' 
 means, says a great Christian Father ^ that work done for 
 ourselves is profitless, but work done for Him Who made 
 the sun, and Who is above the sun, is fruitful. That ' gene- 
 rations pass and the earth abides ' teaches us, says the 
 Jewish Rabbi, that the proud and the wicked are overthrown 
 at last, and the poor and the meek, whom they have trodden 
 beneath their feet as men tread on earth, will in the end be 
 raised up, and survive their oppressors. The sun that rises and 
 sets, and rises again, is not, says the same Christian expositor, 
 the sun that marches through the natural heaven, but the 
 
 ^ St. Augustine. 
 
III.] The Prologue. Allegorical Interpretations. 33 
 
 Sun of Righteousness ; and we have here a prophecy of the 
 coming nativity, of the Death, and Burial, and Resurrection, 
 and Ascension of Christ our Lord. Those streams that flow 
 for ever to the ocean, the brooks that murmur seawards, and 
 suggest to the saddened consciousness of this weary watcher 
 the thought, common to that age with this, that as 'men come 
 and go ' they will * flow on for ever,' are only mentioned, we 
 are told, to remind us that, as those sweet rivulets are lost at 
 last in the wandering fields of barren brine, so guilty joys 
 and sensual pleasures must needs end at last in everlasting 
 bitterness. That ' there is no new thing under the sun ' is 
 not the weary groan of a soul, to which all the history of the 
 past has lost its savour : it is merely a phrase used to convey 
 to us the very narrow and misleading, but by no means 
 novel or unfamiliar maxim, that outside the sacred record 
 we shall find no solid or instructive teaching in the story of 
 our race. That as the past is forgotten, so the memory of 
 the present will fade and perish, is merely a mode of saying 
 that as one guilty and rebellious race, such as Amalek, has 
 been already exterminated, so those which share its guilt 
 will in due time meet the doom which they deserve. 
 
 Need I go on ? I have not, you will believe, paused in 
 what is far more interesting, to read to you these character- 
 istic interpretations, merely to excite a smile, but with a 
 deliberate purpose. For whole centuries, Jew and Christian 
 vied with each other in dealing with the whole of this book 
 in a similar manner, and the result was two-fold. 
 
 First, all the difficulties, all the problems, which the book 
 stirs, were effectually disposed of. Does the writer seem to 
 say that all God's world is wholly evil ? Or, further on, that 
 the gift of life itself is not a blessing, but a curse, * a life of 
 nothings ; nothing worth ? ' The answer is ready. It is 
 only the evil in the world of which he speaks. It is only the 
 life of the wicked which is so full of pettiness and full of 
 misery. Does he speak, as speak he will, of man and beast 
 
 D 
 
34 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [iii. 
 
 lying down to die alike ? He merely means that beast-like 
 men, the creatures of their senses, can have no part in the 
 true life hereafter. Does he seem to bid us ' eat and drink ' 
 cheerfully, ' for to-morrow we die ? ' He is, in fact, in words 
 beyond his age, bidding the Christian use freely the unspeak- 
 able gift of the blessed Sacrament of Communion with his 
 Lord. In short, all that is startling, all that is perplexing — 
 I had almost said, all that is characteristic — in his language, 
 is merely a flimsy veil. It is assumed to hide something 
 very different, the ordinary truisms, the habitual, we might 
 almost say the conventional, teaching of a pious reciter of 
 trite and well-worn religious maxims. The ' Preacher' is not 
 a voice out of the dark pre-Christian night, but just one more 
 Preacher, in not the highest or most honoured sense of the 
 word. ' There is nothing new under the sun,' there is cer- 
 tainly nothing new to us in this somewhat tame and common- 
 place discourse. 
 
 And secondly, all the real interest, as well as all the 
 real difficulty, of the book evaporates under such treat- 
 ment. This moody soliloquy, these heart-stirring con- 
 fessions, these riddling utterances, running through the 
 various forms of despairing reflections, cheerful encourage- 
 ment, worldly and prudential maxims, political aphorisms, 
 religious warnings ; wearing at one time the guise of earnest 
 but troubled prose, where we seem to see language struggling 
 to convey thoughts too big for its framework, at another 
 rising to the sad heights of the poetry of despair ; this book, 
 of which it was said long ago that it had no companion, no 
 fellow, in the whole Bible, becomes merely a storehouse of 
 well-contrived riddles, where homely truths, great, some of 
 them, in their naked simplicity and dignity, lose their force 
 by being wrapped up in meaningless conundrums. The 
 book becomes no longer a serious study for earnest men, 
 but a pastime for grown-up children, a playground for 
 trifling pedants. 
 
III.] The Prologue. Ch. \. 2-11. 35 
 
 Let us put away, once for all, this mode of treatment, and 
 come back to these opening words, stern and grim and 
 forbidding as they seem. We will do this in the conviction that 
 they come too clearly from the speaker's heart to be ex- 
 plained away ; that he is in too serious a frame for trifling ; that 
 whatever be the desolation of his mood, one thing at least he 
 can do — he can say what he means, and mean what he says. 
 
 He looks out then, in verse 3, on this busy human race 
 — busy then, busier, it may be, now. We too can think of 
 a toiling world, larger than he dreamed of; those patient 
 Hindoos, these thrifty Frenchmen, those weary Fellaheen, 
 those laborious Chinese, these masses at our own doors; the 
 hum and roar of machinery on this side the Atlantic and on 
 that ; these toiling millions, this incessant drudgery ; the 
 industrial triumphs, the feverish haste, the eager thought, the 
 philanthropic, the missionary zeal of our own place and time. 
 What profit, he asks, hath man from all his toil, that he toils 
 (so runs the Hebrew) beneath the sun ? What profit ? what 
 result ? In Hebrew, even more than in English, the question 
 suggests its own sad answer. 
 
 But the Preacher is not content with this gloomy question, 
 or with the reply that it challenges. He pursues the theme 
 unrelentingly. Generations, he says, in the fourth and fol- 
 lowing verses, come and go ; their lives die out like fading 
 sparks. Generation passeth away, and getieratioticomeih. They 
 pass, but the earth abideth ; the earth, and dumb unchanging 
 Nature. The unwearied sun pants, he says in his own 
 language, through his daily round, unmoved by the wreck of 
 human lives. The winds revolve and circle and shift and 
 blow with a hateful monotony of change. What to them we 
 seem to hear him say, those stormy seas and cruel tornados, 
 those ' sinking ships and praying hands ' ? Downwards 
 from their unexhausted sources flow the streams through 
 time-worn channels to a changeless sea, a sea whose 
 shores are strewn with the wrecks of empires. All nature 
 
 B 2 
 
^6 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. [iii. 
 
 tells of this weary, unvarying round. No tongue^ he says, in 
 verse 8, can tell, no eye can see, no ear can catch, the full range of 
 this depressing, self -repealing, etidless cycle. There is no advance, 
 no progress. And the page of History tells the same tale. He 
 sees no onward movement there ; no evolution or development 
 in Nature, no ' one increasing purpose running through the 
 ages,' in the story of mankind. It is the same tale, stirring, 
 it might be, if it stood alone, dulled and blunted and made 
 tame by incessant repetition. There is nothing new, nothing 
 great. All that is human repeats itself, and sinks into the 
 great gulf of oblivion and decay. The earth abides, the 
 sun rises, the rivers run, the winds blow, the sea rolls, man 
 lives his brief day, and dies ; all things are forgotten ; the earth 
 abides. Vanity of vanities : all is vanity. It is a dreary world ! 
 Can anything in the world be sadder than his mood ? 
 What a gap we feel at once between such language and the 
 Psalmist's exulting joy in nature : The heavens declare the 
 glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork'^ ; 
 his words who sees the sun going forth as a bridegroom, and 
 rejoicing as a strong man to run a race; or his who, after 
 looking round on creation, cries. Lord, how manifold are Thy 
 works ; i?i wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is 
 full of thy riches'^. What a difference from the language of 
 the Shepherd King, as he pours out his full heart in gladness 
 at the familiar sight of the starry heavens. They suggest to 
 him, as well they may, his own insignificance. But they do 
 not 'burn and brand his nothingness' into his soul. Whe7i I 
 consider Thy heavens^, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the 
 stars which Thou hast ordaified ; What is man, that Thou art 
 mindful of him .^ and the son of mayi, that Thou visitest him .^ 
 * But for aU that,' he cries, ' Thou hast made man scarce less than 
 divine ; Thou hast crowned Thy creature man with glory and 
 with honour ; and for all that,' O Lord, our Lord, how excellent 
 is Thy name in all the earth I Thou that hast set Thy j.^ lory above 
 ^ Ps. xix. "^ Ps. civ. 24. ^ Ps. viii. 
 
III.] The Prologue. Ch. \. 2-1 1. 37 
 
 the heavens. What a difference also, if we turn to our own 
 day, between his weary and bitter mood and that of the most 
 mournful tones of modern poetry. Nature does not touch — 
 does not seem to touch — and sadden him by the very sense of 
 its unutterable and mysterious beauty. There is no trace of 
 the ' pain of finite souls that yearn ' to something unapproach- 
 able, unattainable. There is no echo of the feeling with 
 which a Keats listened to the music of the nightingale, and 
 sighed for ' easeful death.' There is none of that with which a 
 Shelley lay down in the Bay of Naples, and, overborne by the 
 contrast between the boundless loveliness around him and the 
 want of peace within, called on the sea to ' breathe over his 
 dying brain its last monotony.' The ' innocent brightness of 
 a new-born day' that filled Wordsworth with a thoughtful 
 joy, is to him mere weariness. The sunrise is no ' glorious 
 birth,' but only a type of nature's dull, remorseless pulse, 
 beating and beating through endless time, while men die 
 out, decay, and are forgotten. Nor, on the other hand, does 
 he read in nature what modern eyes have read, the stern and 
 ruthless law working out the advancement of all organic life, 
 through pain and suffering, through hunger, strife, and death. 
 To him all creation is stationary, or revolves in an endless, 
 weary, cruel, unmeaning circle. 
 
 Or shall we pause for one moment to contrast his view of 
 the felt meaninglessness of the history of mankind, of its dull 
 flux and reflux, its weary ebb and flow, with that of the 
 Psalmists of his race } I have considered the days 0/ old'^, says 
 one of these, the years of ancient times. I will remember the 
 works of the Lord, — The years 0/ the right hand 0/ the Most 
 High, — of Him whose way is in the sea and whose path in 
 the great waters. Who led His people like sheep by the hand 
 of Moses and Aaroji ; Who was known to them by the 
 title of ' The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.' 
 In him ',s;ho speaks to us to-day we see no interest in the 
 
 •■ Ps. Ixxvii. 5, 10, 19, 20. 
 
38 LecUires on Ecclesiastes. [in. 
 
 past, no hope for the future. Of the two great factors in the 
 life of Judaism, the inspiring memories of earlier days, and the 
 eager anticipation of a greater day yet to come, we find, 
 and we shall find, no trace. The child of a race from which, 
 after the flesh, He was to be born under whom old things 
 were to pass away, who was to make all things new^, he 
 tells us that the story of his people has run its course, and has 
 nothing fresh to offer; all changes have been rung; there 
 is and will be nothing new. 
 
 Such is the mood in which our Preacher meets us as we 
 pass under the shadow of his teaching ; need I say that we feel 
 the air around him thick and heavy ? Need I say that it is a 
 mood fatal to all exertion, to all activity of an ennobling or 
 uplifting kind? Enthusiasm, self-denial, high aspirations, 
 earnest devotion to an unselfish cause ; the courage and the 
 calmness that spring from the sense that no good work can 
 ever wholly perish, and that the life of the soul that is in 
 union with the Eternal Spirit will endure, when the earth has 
 become a tenantless globe and the sun's fires are cold — these 
 are plants that cannot grow in such a soil. They are incom- 
 patible with such a frame of mind, with such a basis on 
 which to build our lives. 
 
 Yet we know that it is a mood, a frame, a state, a tem- 
 perament, call it what we will, to which, in one form or 
 another, the human soul is at all times liable. It is a malady 
 of our very being, a sad prerogative of our nature — this pro- 
 found, unappeasable, irresistible, mysterious melancholy, taking 
 at times the form of a spiritual paralysis, a moral apathy ; this 
 sense of unsatisfiedness, incompleteness on the one hand, and 
 a turning from all that might fill the void on the other. 
 
 * A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
 A stifled, drowsy, nnimpassioned grief, 
 Which finds no natural outlet, no relief 
 In word, or sigh, or tear*.' 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 17. . * S. T. Coleridge. 
 
III.] The Prologue. Ch. i. 2-1 1. 39 
 
 Shall we, my friends, be so startled, so offended, that some 
 place is found for such a mood, for such a frame, in that 
 sacred book which traces the dealings with our spirits of the 
 Father of all spirits ? Or shall we rather be thankful that, in 
 the great record of the spiritual history of the chosen and 
 typical race, some place should be kept for the sigh of 
 defeated hopes, for the gloom of the soul vanquished by the 
 sense of the anomalies and mysteries of human life ? It seems 
 to me that we may well rejoice that, at a season which tells us 
 of the coming of the great Consoler, we should be reminded 
 not only of those wounds which He would have us try to heal 
 or console, its diseases, its afflictions, its destitution, its ignor- 
 ance, its misery, its open graves, its desolate hearts, but of its 
 vaguer and more impenetrable sadness, to which we so often 
 minister in vain. ' Come unto Mel He said, * all ye that 
 labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest;' and 
 he who speaks to us to-day was one of those who carried a 
 heavy burden. The burden will grow heavier. He has 
 shown us as yet but the twilight of his soul. His hour of 
 midnight is yet to come. For him, also, and for those who 
 in any measure feel, or have felt, with him, there is, be sure, 
 a larger and a deeper sympathy than man can offer ; in 
 even a wider sense than that of the Psalmist, the human 
 spirit may say. Why art thou so full 0/ heaviness, oh my soul, 
 and why so disquieted within me ? Put thy trust in God, for 
 I will yet thank him, who is the help of my countenance and 
 my God^. 
 
 ^ Ps. xlii. II. 
 
 [November 22, 1884.] 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 The Title. Chapter I. 12 — II, ii. 
 
 I COME back for a short space to-day to the few words 
 with which the book opens; to that which, in a modern 
 work, would form its title-page — to the first verse of Chap- 
 ter I. The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in 
 ferusalem. Of the second portion of that title-verse I have 
 spoken already; I will now try to interest you for a few 
 moments on what precedes it ; on the phrase, The words 
 of the Preacher. 
 
 ' The word here translated by ' The Preacher,' is one which 
 will meet us no less than seven times in the twelve chapters 
 which we have to consider. I have already reminded you 
 that it is, in the original language, one and the same 
 word as that to translate which the word Ecclesiastes has 
 been borrowed by our translators from the Septuagint, or 
 Greek translation of the Old Testament. The latter word has 
 thus, though a purely Greek word, in rare use, and of not 
 absolutely certain meaning, passed into familiar English usage. 
 The two words then, you will remember, Ecclesiastes, used as 
 the ordinary title, and the Preacher, which takes its place in 
 the body of the work, are renderings of the same Hebrew 
 word. And this Hebrew word, Koheleth, is itself a puzzle, an 
 almost insoluble puzzle. It occurs nowhere else, and its 
 meaning therefore can only.be inferred or conjectured from 
 that of kindred words. It has been even suggested, and 
 there is nothing alien to the analogy of later Hebrew 
 literature in the theory, that it may have been coined by 
 the writer to convey some enigmatic meaning, the key to 
 
IV.] Meaning of the Title. 4T 
 
 which has been wholly lost. It is clearly a noun, or, to speak 
 more accurately, a participle equivalent to a noun, de- 
 rived from an existing verb. It is strangely enough a feminine 
 noun, representing possibly, as do also our own feminine 
 personifications of Truth, Justice, Charity, Temperance, Faith, 
 an abstract idea rather than a definite person. But into 
 these abstruse and subtle questions, as to the sometimes 
 strange significance of feminine words in Hebrew and other 
 languages, you will not, I am sure, care for me to enter. The 
 Hebrew word is interpreted by many of the best authorities, 
 as a gatherer or caller together, an assembler, or uniter of men. 
 Hence it was that a term, signifying in his own tongue 
 The Preacher, was chosen by Luther for his own great trans- 
 lation. It was borrowed from him by our English translators. 
 I need not remind you how familiar men were, in Germany 
 and in England alike, at the era of the Reformation, with 
 the power of preaching, of pronouncing, i.e. public discourses, 
 before large gatherings of men and women, in spreading the 
 revival, as in the first foundation, of Christian teaching. It is 
 still, as we know, a power in the world. Yet we see at once that, 
 as applied to this book, the term suggests perhaps somewhat 
 too modern an image ; at all events that its language is hardly 
 that of a spoken address on a religious subject to a popular 
 audience, such as we connect with the idea of preaching. 
 We can scarcely look on what we shall read as a sermon, or 
 collection of short sermons. Indeed the writer seems at times 
 deliberately to refuse to preach to us, to put aside the most 
 marked opportunities for so doing. 
 
 It would be out of place to enter further into a disquisition 
 on so difficult a subject, on which no one can decide with 
 certainty, and which would have little interest for many here. 
 You will be content to take it, on the authority of others, that 
 the Hebrew word, which gives its title to the book, is 
 extremely obscure; but that the most prominent and most 
 probable interpretations are, that it signifies ; 
 
42 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [iv. 
 
 First, and for this sense there seems to be much evidence, 
 one who assembles an audience in order to address them, — a 
 Lecturer, or, in a certain sense of the term, a Preacher. In 
 this sense I shall venture to retain the word. 
 
 Secondly, one who frequents, or lakes part in, such an 
 assembly — a Debater or Discusser. 
 
 Thirdly, one who unites a body of men not to each other, 
 but to God ; indicating thus very closely a supposed purpose 
 of the book, to reconcile God's people to their divine Lord — 
 a Uniter or Reconciler. 
 
 Fourthly, it is held that the word Koheleth bears, if I may 
 be allowed to use the language of grammar, no longer an 
 active, but a passive sense ; and that it signifies one who is 
 reunited to God ; the Solomon, who has by many been sup- 
 posed to be making in these chapters the recantation of his 
 errors and the confession of his sins. 
 
 Lastly, it has been held to mean nothing more than the 
 Collector or Gatherer, not of men, but of truths ; to signify 
 thus the various maxims, views, aphorisms, and thoughts, 
 embodied in the work of which it is the title. 
 
 I will go no further, though I might greatly enlarge the 
 list of conflicting interpretations set before us by students of 
 the Hebrew language. Yet it may interest you to have heard 
 these five interpretations : the Preacher of our own version ; 
 the Debater ; the Reconciler — these three are not, you will 
 notice, for practical purposes, so very far apart — and, besides 
 these, two wholly different, the Reconciled and the Collector. 
 
 And it may interest you also, in connexion with these 
 different views as to the meaning of the very title of the book, 
 to indicate the main views which have been founded on that 
 title as to its purpose and object. 
 
 I need say no more of a theory which I have already put 
 fully and fairly before you, that it is the work of one who, 
 had he lived in the nineteenth century, would have not 
 flinched from calling himself an avowed sceptic and pessimist. 
 
IV.] Meaning of the Title. 43 
 
 I set aside also those which regard it as a mere series of 
 words, in themselves insignificant, but used as a veil for 
 conveying in a string of enigmas a system of Jewish, or 
 Christian, teaching quite apart from their apparent sense. 
 
 But those who are content to let the author speak, as other 
 authors, within or without the circle of inspired writers, are 
 wont to speak, take in the main three different views of its 
 contents and object, each implied in their translation of 
 its title-page. 
 
 For those to whom the word translated ' Preacher ' bears 
 a sense answering to that of our ' Collector,' the book 
 contains the thoughts, not of one man, but two or far more. 
 It is a sort of dialogue or conference, recalling, as I said 
 before, 'The Two Voices' of our own poet, Tennyson; and 
 thus all that seems gloomy, or sceptical, or fatalistic, or 
 epicurean, in the chapters before us, is easily ascribed to one 
 or other of the unnamed interlocutors ; all that is of another 
 character comes from one of firmer faith, who utters from 
 time to time words of higher wisdom. 
 
 Ingenious as is the view, and ready as is the solution 
 which it seems to present to many of the difficulties of the 
 book, I can find, I confess, no foundation whatever in its 
 plan or structure for such a theory. 
 
 To others, who lean rather to the view that 'the Preacher' 
 is here one who is uniting his people to God, the title is taken 
 as signifying the express purpose of the book. It is looked 
 on as the attempt in dark and gloomy days of one who shares 
 the darkness and the gloom, to lead his people to the dim 
 light that still remains; to bid them not despair, but enjoy 
 cheerfully what is given day by day, and trust in the certainty 
 — the certainty in spite of all appearances to the contrary — 
 of ultimate retribution. 
 
 Doubtful as is this interpretation of the tide, its upholders 
 have at all events seized on one leading feature of the book. 
 
 Some, I need hardly say, carry its aim much higher. They 
 
44 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [iv. 
 
 speak of the book as written to cheer the heart of conquered 
 and despairing Israel, by holding up to them the solution of 
 all their doubts and difficulties in the hope of Immortality 
 and of a judgment beyond the grave ; of a solution in another 
 world — not here, but there — of all life's problems. By many 
 also the book has been treated as the humble recantation of 
 the penitent Solomon, now united and reconciled to the God 
 whom he had abandoned. It has been spoken of as a ' dirge/ 
 a penitential dirge over his errors ; an account of his 
 wanderings to and fro in a search after happiness, and an 
 attempt to point his people to the true source of rest and 
 peace. It thus gives the history of his return from ' cisterns, 
 broken cisterns that can hold no water,' to the one unfailing 
 well-spring of wisdom and of happiness. 
 
 If I may once more indicate my own view, I cannot for a 
 moment look on the book as a dialogue: still less as an un- 
 completed, unordered, medley of fragmentary and conflicting 
 maxims. Nor, again, can I venture to speak to you of it as 
 the outcome of a penitent and contrite spirit, as something to 
 be taken to the very heart of Christendom, side by side with 
 the 51st Psalm. Of repentance, of the sense of sin, of the 
 yearning for forgiveness, I see no trace. Nor, again, can I 
 accept the view that it is an essay or debate, however informal, 
 on the nature of true happiness ; still less that it is a gracious 
 revelation of Christian truths ; or an invitation to a life of 
 ascetic self-denial ; or a contrast drawn between the hollow- 
 ness of all that is seen and temporal, and the enduring nature 
 of what is spiritual and eternal. 
 
 I need hardly tell you that if I thought with a distinguished 
 modern writer, whose facile pen has ranged through such a 
 vast circle of the persons and subjects nearest and dearest to 
 the heart of humanity, that it is merely an Epicurean essay, 
 written by some cold-blooded forerunner of the Sadducee 
 who was to come, on the hoUowness of everything except the 
 moderated and calculated engagement of the passing hour; 
 
IV.] Aim of the Book. 45 
 
 and that it had somehow been permitted by blundering Rabbis 
 to find a place in the Sacred Canon, I should not have 
 attempted to draw your attention to it in this house, sacred to 
 the worship of a God revealed to us in the Man of Sorrows. 
 Need I say here once more that, whatever the meaning of this 
 mysterious title, the book seems to me to paint in dark yet most 
 instructive colours, an hour in the history of the pre-christian 
 age when one great article in the simple creed of the early 
 Jewish Church, its belief in a fully retributive system here 
 below, had been shaken to its base ; shaken alike by the 
 experience of a more complex stage of society, and by the 
 crushing of God's people under heathen powers .-• Let any 
 one here read on his return the 44th Psalm. He will see 
 what clouds must have seemed to pass between God's face 
 and the soul of the devout Hebrew. At such a time came a 
 voice, evoking from the distant past the name of the great 
 type and master of human wisdom, sharing all the gloom 
 that had settled on the race ; echoing its deepest murmurs in 
 accents of unsurpassable, immeasurable melancholy, and yet, 
 as we shall find, seeing even behind the darkest clouds, some 
 faint gleams of light ; repelling fanaticism on one side, denial 
 of God on the other ; holding firm, even in the shipwreck of 
 hope, to some fragments of cheerfulness, even in the bank- 
 ruptcy of faith, to two things which contain the germ of all 
 that is most precious to our race, the belief in God and the 
 belief in Duty. Was it the last time in the history of mankind, 
 that even these have been of priceless value ? 
 
 Let us now follow the account which the writer gives from the 
 twelfth verse onwards — gives, you will notice, in the person of 
 one who speaks of himself as king, not in the present but in the 
 past, over Israel, and that in Jerusalem, as though opposed to the 
 Northern Kingdom — of the first of his experiences of the 
 hollowness of life, and his first full comment on the text, 
 * Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' 
 
 / the Preacher, he begins, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 
 
/ 
 
 46 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [iv. 
 
 And I gave my heart, he adds, to seek and search out by 
 wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven. 
 
 He gave, he tells us, his whole mind to the search after 
 wisdom in every range of subject beneath the skies. To the 
 pursuit, he means, it would seem, of some clear light that 
 would harmonize and reconcile all the contradictions and 
 anomalies of life, and satisfy all the longings of his soul. 
 He adds words which remind us that his tone is no less 
 removed from the yearning enquiries after God of the 
 Psalmist, or of Job, than from the enthusiasm and delight of 
 the modern student of nature or of science. This weary 
 search for knowledge, he says, is a task imposed on man; to 
 ask and ask, to seek and seek, this sore travail hath God 
 given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. ' This sore 
 travail ' is God's gift ; not the power to discover truth, but 
 the imperious instinct that bids him return and return, 
 generation after generation, to the everlasting riddle. And 
 what was the result ^ I looked round, he tells us in verse 14, 
 at all that was done beneath the sun ; I considered the whole 
 range of human life. / have seen all the works that are done 
 under the sun ; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit ; 
 or rather, all is mere breath or vapour ; mere striving after * 
 ox feeding, as some translate it, on, empty wind. And all 
 efforts to set right the tangled skein of life are vain. That 
 which is crooked cannot be made straight : and that which is 
 wanting cannot be numbered. What is absent, missing, or 
 lost, cannot be recovered, or held as your own. And so, as 
 the result of all, I turned to my own heart, and said, how 
 vain the search ! / communed with mine own heart, saying, 
 Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotteft more wisdom 
 than all they that have been before me in ferusalem : yea, my 
 heart had great experience of wisdom atid knowledge. And I 
 gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madjiess and folly : 
 I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit (striving after 
 ^ ' A striving after wind,' R. V. 
 
IV.] The Pursuit of Wisdom. Ch. i. 12-18. 47 
 
 wind). I, who have stood on such vantage ground, who have 
 accumulated such stores of the results of study and thought, 
 have gained only the sad experience that all this is hollow 
 and unsatisfying ; that wider vision brings wider sights of sad- 
 ness, and added knowledge is added sorrow. Wisdom, the 
 wisdom which consists in knowledge, brings no balm to the dis- 
 quiet of the human heart. For in much wisdom is much grief: 
 and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow (verse 18). 
 
 The language is, as you see at once, that of something 
 more than a passing mood of weariness. It has no resem- 
 blance to that in which the greatest genius that sleeps 
 within this Abbey spoke of himself, as gathering shells and 
 pebbles on the shore of the great ocean, yet unexplored. 
 It does not echo the thought ever present to the mind of the 
 true philosopher, quantum est quod nesci'mus ! ' how vast the 
 field of our ignorance.' It runs far beyond the inevitable 
 depression which, even amidst ' the intoxicating draughts ' of 
 fresh triumphs in the domain of natural science, the infinity 
 of knowledge lays upon her students. Need I say how far 
 it is from the language of St. Paul, we know in part, we 
 prophesy in part, hut when that which is perfect is come, that 
 which is in part shall be done away? I will not divert you 
 from the sense of its full bitterness by putting before you 
 the strange comments by which Jew or Christian has con- 
 verted it into a commonplace series of remarks on the 
 unsatisfactoriness of mere human knowledge as compared 
 to higher teaching. The words are the words of a saddened 
 soul, sad with an infinite sadness. Let us sympathise with 
 that hour of darkness, not turn it into a well-balanced and 
 measured utterance of edifying maxims, which any ordinarily 
 instructed Christian man or woman might quote, with the 
 misjudging piety of the friends of Job, to preach down the 
 tumult of some restless brain or rebellious spirit. 
 
 But he has not yet sounded the depths of disappointment 
 and despair. Let us follow him, — wearing, as he will, for 
 
 ./ 
 
48 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [iv. 
 
 one step further, the mask of Solomon, — to the next stage in 
 his sad experience. He has tried knowledge, and found 
 nothing to satisfy his heart's cravings, and now he will turn 
 i/ elsewhere. We open the second chapter ; we read, / said in 
 mine heart (or, rather, to mine heart). Go to now, I will prove 
 thee (try thee) with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure ; and he 
 tells at once the sad result before he has filled up the 
 sketch ; and, behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter. 
 It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? Of mirth and 
 laughter, he says, personifying each, I said the one is mad- 
 ness, the other meaningless and profitless. But having said 
 I this — for the sense of hollowness is too acute for him to 
 delay the saying it — he tells at length the story. He 
 recounts to us in the following verses how at first he resolved 
 with his own heart, as we should say, with his soul, to 
 which as our own poet in that ' Palace of Art,' which recalls 
 at every step, and is the best of commentaries on, the whole 
 passage, he ascribes a distinct personality — he resolved to give 
 himself, his flesh, as he says more plainly, to enjoyment and 
 banqueting. / sought in mijie heart to give myself unto wine ; 
 yet not for a moment to the coarse revels of the North, or 
 to the refined gluttony of consular or imperial Rome, yet 
 acquainting mine heart with wisdom ; still, with the reins of 
 my courser held firm, I resolved to go so far only in the folly 
 of a life of enjoyment as to see whether it could bring any 
 real solution to the riddles of life, any true solace for the 
 short-Uved sons of men ; and to lay hold on folly, till I might 
 see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should 
 do wider the heaven all the days of their life. As we read his 
 words we may pause for a moment to note the measured 
 and calm accents in which he records his experience. There 
 is not, there will not be, the slightest trace of any touch 
 of penitence or remorse. It is the autobiography of a self- 
 inspecting philosophic spirit trying experiments on itself, and 
 reporting the result with a sorrowful impartiality. 
 
IV.] The Pursuit of Pleasure. Ch. \\. i-io. 49 
 
 But to proceed. He goes on with his story in the fourth . 
 
 and four following verses. He tells us how he opened and 
 trod every avenue of refined and artistic enjoyment. He 7 
 added palace to palace, like the historic Solomon, or the \ 
 Royal builder of Versailles ; he planted vineyards and parks 
 and gardens, with irrigating lakes and streams, and wide 
 forests, and all the accessories of kingly luxury. And a vast 
 retinue of purchased or home-reared slaves waited on his 
 will, and gold and silver gleamed in his palaces, and all the 
 embellishments of life which are traditional with kings and 
 princes. The singer, male and female, with the musician, was 
 there to charm his ear, and he adds (verse 8) a single phrase 
 which may or may not, for the best authorities are greatly 
 divided, include a reference — at most it is a passing one — to 
 his harem of wives ^; and he crowns the enumeration by 
 telling us in the ninth verse what, if the historic Solomon were 
 speaking, the first Hebrew king who ruled throughout his 
 reign in the Jebusite fastness which his father had won, would 
 have little meaning; he tells us that none in the history of 
 Jerusalem had amassed such ample materials for happiness as 
 he ; adding that wisdom was with him all the time ; guided 
 him in the pursuit of pleasure, never abandoned him in its 
 enjoyment. So I was great, and increased more than all that 
 were before me in Jerusalem : also my wisdom remained with me. 
 And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept 7iot from them, I with- 
 held not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my 
 labour : and this was my portion of all my labour (vv. 9, 10). 
 
 He had kept back that human soul, on which he pictures 
 himself as experimenting, from no source of well-ordered en- 
 joyment. He had done his best to win some portion of 
 that fruit of human toil which, in his prologue, he had pro- / 
 nounced unattainable. And what was the end of all ? I paused 
 he tells us, and gathered up my faculties to consider the result. 
 I looked round at all, all that I had built, and bought, and 
 
 ' See Ch.ii. 8 in R. V. with the marginal notes. 
 E 
 
5o Lectures ofi Ecclesiastes. [iv. 
 
 planted, and gathered from foreign lands, all that wealth and 
 toil and art had poured into my lap. What was their value 
 when possessed ? 
 
 , Behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, vanity and 
 
 feeding upon wind. Every desire had been fully gratified, 
 
 •^ and all in vain. He tells us this very simply, with a pathetic 
 simplicity. He does not try to track his failure to its source, 
 or tell us why, or how, or where, he failed. He, the Preacher, 
 as we style him, does not moralise — still less preach — he just 
 paints the picture of his soul's sad wanderings, of the baffled 
 effort of a human heart, and passes on. Theri I looked on all 
 the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I 
 had laboured to do : and, behold, all was vanity and vexation 
 of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun (v. 1 1). 
 
 And 'so far, the thread of the discourse runs clear. There 
 is no tangle or disarray, and the person, or personation, of the 
 son of David stands out marked and distinct. Soon these helps 
 will be taken from us ; the figure of Solomon will gradually 
 but entirely disappear : another and a sadder than Solomon 
 will pass before us. 
 
 Yet, just as in the Book of Job, it is the hasty reader who is 
 content to confine himself to the story, the clear and touching 
 story, of the book's short introduction and its shorter close, and 
 by doing so to omit those forty chapters which contain the real 
 and essential subject of the book, so we, I think, shall do well 
 to trace out the view of life put forward in the chapters which 
 follow this introduction. We shall have to follow it through 
 somewhat, we must confess, of a maze and labyrinth to which 
 we cannot always discover a clue. But we may find it for all 
 that a task full of interest. It will suggest to us, as we go on, 
 question after question of exceeding urgency and weight. It 
 will enlarge the range of our sympathies ; it will aid some 
 among us to sympathise with, to comprehend and feel for, the 
 difficulties and conclusions of many of our living contempo- 
 raries, as well as to enter into the troubles of a heart that once 
 
IV.] The result of both pursuits. 51 
 
 beat as our hearts beat, and has been dust for centuries. It 
 may aid others among us to realize the infinite value of truths, 
 of words, of teaching, that may have become dulled through 
 their very familiarity. As we face steadily the successive 
 phases of a wisdom that has gone the round of the world 
 under the name of Solomon, we shall see in it a record of 
 thoughts and troubles that belong not only to that gloomy 
 age, and we shall turn with fresh thankfulness to Him Who 
 brought a fresh spring of youth to a worn out world ; Who 
 said of Himself ' a greater than Solomon is here.' 
 
 [November 29, 1884.] 
 
 E 2 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 Chapter II. 12-26. 
 
 We left our Preacher — if, subject to the reservations already 
 made, we may still accept the title — we left him speaking in 
 the person of King Solomon, and uttering words of profound 
 sadness. He had tried, as we saw, to find contentment and 
 happiness, first in the search after knowledge, and next in the 
 ^ pursuit of enjoyment. Both alike had failed him. 
 
 The answer that had come back to his own question, 
 What profit hath man of all his toll P to the same question, 
 t in its modern form, Is life worth living ? had been a disas- 
 trous one. Then I looked, he told us, on all the works that 
 my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured 
 to do : and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and 
 there was no profit under the sun (chap. ii. 11). 
 
 Hitherto, it has not been a very difficult task to follow the 
 speaker's meaning. The very fact that he has spoken in the name 
 of a distinctly-recognised person, with whose individual history 
 we are more or less familiar, and that he has preserved some- 
 thing of one side, at least, of the historical characteristics of 
 the historical Solomon, has supplied a framework, on the 
 lines of which his reflections have been set out, in the form of 
 what we may call a fragment of those autobiographical re- 
 miniscences which rarely fail to interest the reader. But this 
 framework will soon be abandoned. The scaffolding, it has 
 been well said, which supported for a time the growing 
 structure, will be removed, and the plan on which it was 
 commenced will be exchanged for another. We, as we read 
 our Preacher's words, shall feel like those who, after walking 
 
v.] Oiapter n. i2-%6. 53 
 
 on a solid and well-marked highway, are left to find their 
 course across an almost trackless moorland. 
 
 And you will feel too, I doubt not, for the difficulties of him 
 who is to act, in some sense, as your guide. He will have 
 often to keep entirely and resolutely in the background the 
 result of laborious hours and perplexing study. He will have 
 to resist the temptation to pause too long, and to waste your 
 energies and his own in straining to recover the dim sense of 
 individual verses, or half verses, to which commentators of 
 equal authority have attached irreconcilable meanings. And 
 besides this, he will find it almost impossible to ask you to 
 accept unreservedly any of the ingenious attempts to convert 
 the coming chapters into a methodical and orderly treatise, 
 working out with distinct purpose a single and well-defined 
 religious or philosophical problem. The mere record of 
 such attempts on the part of Fathers, Rabbis, Divines, 
 Preachers, Poets, Critics, might form an interesting chapter 
 in literary history, 
 
 I shall therefore be content to treat as shortly as possible, 
 without entirely passing over them, individual difficulties of 
 interpretation and verbal obscurities. I shall only touch on 
 them where great and vital questions are involved. You 
 would, I feel sure, prefer that I should try rather to aid you 
 to gather up, w'here possible, the clue to the various — very 
 various — lines of thought which will now come before us. 
 You would wish me, above all, to place before you a faithful 
 picture of the real and genuine sentiments and teaching of 
 the book ; to draw out what its author really says, as in verse 
 after verse he pours forth the reflections, sometimes clear as 
 day, sometimes wrapped in darkness, always coloured with 
 the sombre hue of some dark hour in the history of his race 
 — as, to use the language of a Jewish commentator^, he 
 ' thinks aloud ' the thoughts that are in his heart. 
 
 Let us answer the call which is implied, as some hold, in 
 
 ' David Friedlander, quoted by Ginsburg, p. 80. 
 
54 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [v. 
 
 the name which he assumes. Let us draw near and Hsten to 
 this ' Assembler ' of his fellow-men. 
 
 The section which follows that of which I spoke last time 
 is, setting aside two short clauses to which we have lost 'the 
 key, full of interest. 
 
 It begins at the 12th verse of chapter ii. I turned myself, 
 he says, after these two sad defeats, to behold., to consider, i. e. 
 wisdom., and also viadness and folly. 
 
 Whether by ' madness and folly ' he means, as his words 
 used just before seem to imply, the pursuit of pleasure, may 
 possibly be questioned. But, at all events, it is clear that, 
 instead of renewing once more the vain and toilsome pursuit 
 of knowledge, he sets himself to consider calmly the relative 
 value of Wisdom in its largest sense ; wisdom practical, and 
 wisdom speculative, and its opposite, which he calls folly. / 
 turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly. 
 
 I pass lightly over an obscure half-verse, with its many 
 conflicting interpretations. Let us accept doubtfully one 
 which comes nearest to our own version : Who can do this, 
 he asks in the second part of verse 12, otherwise, or better 
 than King Solomon has already done it ? Then I saw, he says 
 in the 1 3th verse — I convinced myself — that Wisdom excelleth 
 Folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. You will remember 
 what a high, what a royal place is assigned to Wisdom in 
 portions of the Old Testament; how much of all that is 
 good and holy, as well as all that is prudent, the word 
 involves. You may recall the striking passages in which it 
 is personified, almost deified, in the Book of Proverbs \ 
 and again in Job^. You may remember how, outside the 
 circle of the Canonical books, there was a whole ' literature 
 of Wisdom,' of which the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus 
 are types. You will not forget the uses made of the word by 
 our Lord and by His Apostle, a Hebrew of the Hebrews ^. 
 
 ^ Prov. i. 20; viii, ix. ^ Job xxviii. 12-28. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. xi. 19; St. James iii. 17. 
 
v.] Wisdom mid Folly. Ch. ii. 12-15. ^^ 
 
 And you will note also the figure by which is expressed here 
 the excellence of Wisdom, by light as opposed to darkness. 
 There could be no stronger contrast to the darkness-hating 
 Oriental mind. You know how often, how incessantly, we 
 might say, they are set against one another, as types of all 
 that is most opposite, alike in the Old Testament and the 
 New. Need I quote that familiar parable where the unpro- 
 fitable servant is cast out from the lighted and festal hall to 
 the ' outer darkness ? ' 
 
 Yes! I felt sure, he says, in spite of all, that wisdom is a 
 gain ; that he who has it has the gift of eye-sight — a precious 
 gift. We, my friends, have been reminded but lately of its 
 value by the very courage and energy which replaced its loss\ 
 He who has it not walks in darkness. The wise man's eyes, 
 he adds, are in his head, but the fool walketh in darkness. It 
 is one of the many double, parallel, sayings, proverbs in 
 couplets, which will come before us. 
 
 And yet, and yet, vast, he says, as is the difference which I 
 felt forced to see between them ; splendid as are the charms 
 of Wisdom, unlovely as is the face of Folly, there rose within 
 me a sense that poisoned all, a thought that bred despair. 
 
 For a little space the wise man seems, yea is, endowed 
 with a gift, a priceless gift, denied to the other, the fool. 
 For a little space, but, ah ! coupled in our own Bibles by the 
 conjunction and, and brought within the compass of the same 
 fourteenth verse, come words almost tragic in their simplicity, 
 and''' I myself perceived also that one event happeneth, one end 
 Cometh, to them all. Then I said iti my heart, As it happeneth 
 to the fool, so it happeneth even to me ; and why was I then 
 more wise .^ Ah ! what avails wisdom, when wisdom and 
 folly lead alike to ' that dark inn, the grave ? ' The?i I said 
 in my heart, that this also is v nity. For it is not only that 
 
 ^ The reference was to the then recent death of Mr..Fawcett, the late 
 lamented Postmaster-General. 
 2 ' and yet,' R. V. 
 
^6 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [v. 
 
 the wise man lies down and dies with the fool, but the wisdom 
 which that 'sore travail' of his soul has gained seems to 
 him, in his bitter mood, to pass away with the flickering torch 
 of life, to pass for ever and for ever. For there is no renieyn- 
 brance, he goes on in the next verse, of the wise more than of 
 the fool for ever ; seeing that which now is in the days to come 
 shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise ??ian ? as the 
 fool (ver. 1 6). Not deca.y only, but forgetfulness, is his portion. 
 The shadow of death lies dark and cold on the thinker's soul. 
 It is a burden that makes life heavy. He is not thinking so 
 much of death as the divider ; not of its breakings off, its 
 cuttings short, its baffling disappointments, its heart-piercing 
 separations, which were being touched on by a master hand 
 even while we met here last Saturday \ but of its blank oblite- 
 rations, its wiping out of all life's work. Therefore, he goes 
 on, / hated life ; for life, even at its best, means labour, and 
 death comes and makes it wasted labour, wasted and for- 
 gotten : Therefore I hated life ; because the work that is 
 wrought under the sun is grievor^s unto me : for all is vanity 
 and vexation of spirit. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 Is our sad Preacher the last to quail before the stern reality 
 of death ? You may remember how our own Poet says to 
 the jocund Skylark, — 
 
 'Waking or asleep, 
 
 Thou of death must deem 
 
 Things more true and deep 
 
 Than we mortals dream ; 
 
 Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ? ' 
 
 And we recognise the same voice of sadness, ' deep calling 
 unto deep ' across the ages. 
 
 Let us pass on. The verses which follow, from the 
 eighteenth to the twenty-third, linger round the same sad 
 theme, in language coloured by the circumstances of his age 
 and country. Death comes, and not only all the wisdom of 
 
 * An address of Mr. Matthew Arnold at Tovnbee Hall. 
 
v.] The Doom of Death. Ch. li. 16-23. SI 
 
 the dead sage goes out, like an extinguished torch, and is 
 forgotten ; but all the other results of his eager toil are lost to 
 him, and pass he knows not whither. Toilsome days, anxious 
 nights, no real enjoyment even in life, and then death comes 
 and blots out all. And then another, he knows not who, 
 some careless unknown stranger, it may be, ■yvho has neither 
 toiled nor spun, enters into the harvest of all his labours. 
 
 'The hard heir strides about his lands,' and he sleeps 
 below. His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not ; and 
 they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of theni^. 
 
 Shall we listen to his gloomy thoughts, as, brooding over 
 them, he thinks aloud once more ? Yea, I hated all my 
 labour which I had taken under the sun : because I should 
 leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth 
 whether he shall be a wise man or a fool ? yet shall he have 
 rule over all my labour wherein 1 have laboured, and wherein 
 I have shotved tnyself wise under the sun. This is also 
 VANITY. Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair 
 of all the labour zvhich 1 took under the sun. For there is a 
 man whose labour is in ivisdom, arid in hwwledge, and in 
 equity ; yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he 
 leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil. 
 For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation 
 of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun ? For 
 all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief ; yea, his heart 
 taketh not rest in the night. This is also vanity. 
 
 I cannot join with those who read in these moody verses 
 the language of a Solomon distrusting the character of the 
 Rehoboam who was to succeed him, and to throw away the 
 result of the achievements of David and of his father's 
 wisdom. For myself, the very general form in which the 
 thought is clothed, and much that immediately follows, 
 seem to me to point rather to the hard experience of the 
 
 ' Job xiv. 21. 
 
58 Lectures 07i Ecclesiastes. [V. 
 
 uncertain transmission of wealth under Eastern misgovern- 
 ment. But it will interest you to indicate a common inter- 
 pretation, which may commend itself to some among us. 
 
 Let us return for a moment to what has gone before. It 
 is important that we should enter fully into his thoughts. 
 
 The writer has compared wisdom and folly. He has 
 recognised the intrinsic excellence of the one, the worth- 
 lessness and deformity of the other. 
 
 But side by side with this he has before him the terrible, 
 and, as he states the case, the insoluble problem of death. 
 
 What matters to us, he seems to say, the difference .? We 
 die as the flowers of the forest — as the beasts of the field, he 
 will soon add — wise and foolish alike, we die. And this 
 power of attaining some measure of wisdom, this prerogative 
 of self-imposed toil, in what are we the better for it ? We 
 die, and its results, so far as they are internal, die with us. 
 So far as they are external, they pass to others, perhaps to those 
 unworthy of them. Man walketh in a vain shadow and dis- 
 qiiieteth himself in vain. He heapeth up riches and cannot tell 
 xvho shall gather them'^. So far the Psalmist is with him ; but 
 the Psalmist can add, as we Christians are taught to remem- 
 ber when we lay our brothers in the dust. And noiv, Lord, 
 what is my liope ? Truly my hope is evefi in Thee. But of 
 this clinging to, this trusting in, yearning towards, a God far 
 off, yet near, we have found no trace. Thus far, at least, 
 there is not a touch of any hope beyond the veil of death. 
 
 'No breath of answering whisper steals 
 From the shore that hath no shore beyond it.' 
 
 What shall we find? Something there must surely be to 
 break this intolerable spell of dreariness and gloom. Yes, 
 it meets us quite suddenly, when and where we least look 
 for it ; and here we have its very first appearance : There is 
 nothing better for a man, he breaks forth, in verse 24, than 
 that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul 
 ^ Ps. xxxix. 7, 8. 
 
v.] The call to enjoyment. Ch. ii. 24-26. 59 
 
 etijoy good in his labour. This also I saw, thai it was from 
 the hand of God. 
 
 This, at least, he tells us, is God's gift, the enjoyment of 
 the present, the immediate entering into the fruit of our 
 labour. Do not therefore shrink from it ; for who, he adds, 
 in words obscure even to darkness, can eat, or who else hasten 
 to it more than I ? (verse 25). Who, he may mean, has a greater 
 and more immediate claim to the fruit of my toil than I, 
 the toiler? For, and now, in verse 26, he strikes, or seems 
 to strike, a very different note, startling us once more by the 
 sudden change. For God giveth to a ?)ian, he says, that is 
 good in his sight wisdo7n, and knowledge, and joy ; hut to the 
 sinner he giveth travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may 
 give him that is good before God. What is this .? You see 
 how abrupt the change ! Does God really give to the good 
 man, not wisdom only, but also knowledge, and not that 
 only, but joy and happiness ? And is it only the bad man, 
 the sinner, who has the weary toil of amassing wealth, which 
 passes in due time to the good? If so, the world is no 
 longer a weary waste, but a very Utopia ; and the speaker, if 
 this is his conviction, has risen from the moral and religious 
 ruins that surrounded him just now, to the perception of an 
 all-pervading righteous rule even in this life. Our Hamlet 
 no longer finds the world out of joint. 
 
 Dare we say that so bright a light has suddenly illuminated 
 the darkness of which he has been speaking, the darkness of 
 which he is yet to speak in still sadder accents ? 
 
 If so, he seems to mount too soon and too high. What 
 follows in the same breath, in the same verse ? It is the last 
 verse with which I shall tax your attention to-day : this also 
 
 IS VANITY AND VEXATION OF SPIRIT. But how SO? HaS he 
 
 found Strength and comfort in the conviction that goodness 
 brings, even in this life, wisdom, knowledge, joy ? — so he seems 
 to say — and that the prosperity of the wicked is only illusory, 
 and short-lived? Is his language merely that of Psalmist 
 
6o Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [v. 
 
 after Psalmist, who comforts himself with the thought that 
 the well-doing of the unrighteous is but temporary, that even 
 on this side the grave a sure retribution waits on evil ? That 
 ihey, the evildoers, are set in slippery places and /all suddenly^. 
 Does he believe that happiness and misery, even here on earth, 
 are meted out in strict proportion to the merits of mankind ? 
 If so, why this sad refrain, This also is vanity and vexation 
 of spirit? What! this — a world where perfect justice rules, 
 where goodness always triumphs, and evil is always punished ! 
 You can recall, perhaps, that touching Psalm, just quoted, 
 where, weary with the same problem of the strange ' prosperity 
 of the wicked,' the Psalmist goes into the sanctuary of the Lord, 
 and finds some answer to a question before which his feet 
 were almost gone, his steps had well-nigh slipped. And we know 
 the words with which he hails some partial — a very partial — 
 reply to his sad perplexity : Whom have I in heaven but thee ? 
 and there is none upon earth that / desire beside thee. My flesh 
 and my heart faileth : but God is the strength of my heart, and 
 my portion for ever. But if he who speaks so sadly throughout 
 these verses really holds, what he seems for a moment to hold, 
 that human life, when surveyed in its length and breadth, teaches 
 us not only that goodness in God's sight brings, in the highest 
 sense, wisdom, knowledge, and joy in its train, but also a very 
 different lesson — that all the toil of the wicked goes to swell 
 the earthly prosperity of the good — if this is so, we feel that 
 he has taxed our sympathies for his despairing mood in vain. 
 We can enter for a while into real dejection or into poetic 
 pain; 
 
 ' Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.* 
 
 But if our poet, if poet he be, has found so simple a 
 solution for God's ' mysterious ways,' for all the inexplicable 
 wounds and sorrows of human life, then this dreary repetition 
 of the most dreary of phrases becomes a phrase and nothing 
 
 * Ps. Ixxiii. 17. 
 
v.] Chapter ii. 36, 61 
 
 more — a literary artifice, not a groan wrung from an aching 
 heart. Its repetition henceforth will be as the peevish cry of 
 an angry fancy. The book should have ended here, for the 
 cloud is past, and the sun is in the sky. We should look to 
 hear the singing of the birds, and see earth thick with 
 flowers. Or is it that he states so cheering, yet so inadequate, 
 and, let me add, so unreal a source of comfort, only to put 
 it by ? Does he feel that such a maxim, ' God gives the good 
 man all that is good, the sinner all that is evil,' dear as it 
 was to his fathers, brings him no balm .' Does he repeat it 
 musingly, half ironically, as it were ; and then add, this also 
 is tried in the balance and found wanting — all is vanity 
 and vexation of spirit ? 
 
 Or is it, rather, that he looks for a moment on his Maker 
 as a God of power, unUmited power and resistless will ? Is 
 it that he finds, or tries to find, in that mere power, that mere 
 will, the solvent of all questions, all problems .'' If so, he who, 
 in the twenty-sixth verse, is ' good before God ' is just the 
 favoured mortal, and ' the sinner,' he who is not favoured ; 
 and he thus divides the world into two classes, the Elect and 
 the Reprobate. And the Elect mean with him, not those who 
 respond to all the hidden movements and pleadings of the 
 Spirit of Truth and Goodness, but the happy, the fortunate 
 in being elect. And by ' the Reprobate ' — ' the sinner ' is his 
 word — he means, not those who resist all workings for good, 
 but those who, though successful for a time, in the end fall 
 into misery and ruin, because they are born under their 
 Maker's frown. 
 
 We can understand the attraction which such a view 
 might have, in all ages, to minds that, looking out on the 
 suffering and miseries of life, dwell only on the power of a 
 Divine Ruler, and lose sight of His goodness and His love. 
 Do any here remember the terrible lines in which Homer 
 makes the Lord of Heaven, dwelling himself secure, fling out 
 at random the irrevocable lots of life-long happiness or 
 
6a Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [v. 
 
 misery to men below ^ ? At all events, we remember how 
 Job's heart was tortured by the thought that all his afflictions 
 meant one thing, and one only, the displeasure, the unmerited 
 displeasure, of an all-powerful God. 
 
 If this is our Preacher's meaning in the closing verse of 
 this chapter, it is no wonder that he feels that he has here 
 one more item in the hollowness and emptiness of life, 
 something that deepens its sadness, intensifies its blackness. 
 This also, he may well add, is vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 
 Shall I now detain you too long if I ask you, before we 
 part, to pause a moment to feel sure that you have grasped 
 firmly some of the distinct threads of thought or feeling 
 which we have, even so far, found running through the texture 
 of the book ? 
 
 First, there is the worthlessness of human life. Millions 
 live out in turn their brief hour ; die, and are forgotten. It 
 is an old, time-worn, theme ; it has been dwelt on by poets, 
 and others than poets, from the dawn of reflective speech 
 to the hour at which we meet to-day : it is not only the 
 shortness of life, the successive generations falling away, as 
 Homer said, Hke the leaves in autumn ; but it is its nothing- 
 ness and insignificance. The sun, the earth, the streams 
 endure ; man passes and leaves no trace. The romance of 
 Jewish history, which can still touch the imagination of the 
 English child, has ceased to fire the heart of this world- 
 weary Hebrew. He does not care to look back on the 
 eventful past. Still less does he hear the footsteps of the 
 coming Messiah in the unseen future. Of the fierce 
 fanaticism that was one day to possess his race he has not 
 a spark. There are those who tell us that this green 
 earth beneath us will one day grow cold and still ; the pulse 
 of life die out ; a dead world revolve, in obedience to a law 
 that will survive it, round a fading sun. But to him who 
 speaks to us thus far the world is already dead. Of the 
 » Iliad, xxiv. 524-553. 
 
v.] Recapitulation. 6^ 
 
 faith that whispers that there is a moral and a spiritual life, 
 which is moving on to higher aims in this long series of what 
 seem to him the dull revolving cycles of nature and of 
 history — a life which is more real and more enduring than 
 the abiding earth, and the ceaseless river, and the unex- 
 hausted sea — that all past changes have been heralds of 
 future progress — that man has a destiny and a nature 
 other than that of the brooks and springs, he has, or indicates 
 at present, no sense, no mastery. Vantly of vanities, all is 
 vanity. 
 
 And again, though he sees, and feels, and says, that some- 
 how wisdom and knowledge are better — far better — than 
 ignorance and folly, yet, in the dark mood of these opening 
 chapters the possession of these priceless jewels brings no 
 comfort. Take wings, he seems to say, and reach with toil 
 and effort the utmost bounds of human thought ; it will 
 not add — trust my sad experience — a grain to life's happiness 
 or meaning. It will only make its burden heavier ; for in 
 much wisdom is much grief, and he that iticreaseth knowledge 
 increaseth sorrow. 
 
 Or try enjoyment. ' Build for thy soul a lordly pleasure- 
 house.' Ransack the world for some paesing alleviation to 
 the bitter sense of life's hollowness. It will profit nothing. 
 This too is vanity. / said of laughter it is mad, and of mirth 
 what profiteth it ? What then ? fall back on the sense that, 
 after all, wisdom is in itself better than folly .'' comfort thyself 
 with this, and care not for the rest. Hold this 'and walk with 
 inward glory crowned.' Alas ! there sits waiting on thy path 
 ' the shadow feared of man.' Death comes, and you and the 
 poor, ignorant, and foolish son of a common race lie dowai 
 together ; and all your wisdom and your high thoughts die 
 with you, and will be clean forgotten ; and all your prudent 
 toil and self-denial, your laborious days and unrestful nights, 
 will have provided what will pass into heedless hands while 
 you, the toiler, are mouldering in the grave. Therefore, he 
 
64 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [V. 
 
 says, / hated life, for all that is wrought beneath the sun is 
 grievous unto me. 
 
 Life then, he seems to whisper, is itself an evil. He will 
 say this more clearly soon. But he has said enough, already, 
 to show that if we call the writer a preacher, he comes to us 
 with no gospel of joy on his lips. His book is written thus 
 far within and without with lamentation, and mourning, and 
 woe. He can only teach us the need, the sore need, of words 
 of comfort, of some ' tidings of great joy ' to himself, to us, and 
 all mankind. 
 
 Thus far, then, we have only the voice of those who in all 
 time, not least in our own, have said that life is no blessing ; 
 have answered the question, ' were it not better not to be ? ' in 
 an affirmative. 
 
 But we have also, let us note it well, the first appearance, 
 the first dawn, of another train of thought that will form a 
 marked feature in all that lies before us. Life being in itself 
 so sad, that voice will say, do not strain thyself to solve these 
 questions. Do not beat against thy prison bars. Eat and 
 drink ; enjoy, i. e. the labour of thy hands. Even this is a 
 gift from God. Do not scorn it, but hold it fast. All gifts, he 
 adds, in a verse on whose obscurity I have already touched, 
 come from him ; thou hast a right to them. 
 
 Weariness, despondency, a sense of the vain conflict be- 
 tween man's aspirations for something enduring, and the terrible 
 reality of death ; a call to accept what temporary alleviations 
 the passing moment brings ; these are so far our preacher's 
 topics. They end with a reference of all things to the will of 
 a God from whom, in one way or another, comes, he feels, 
 what little good man can enjoy. Call him a pessimist, call 
 him a fatalist, call him what you will, he is certainly, it has 
 been justly said, no Atheist ; even in his darkest mood he is 
 full of the sense ' that there is a God above him.' 
 
 The cloud that hides the face of that God from him will 
 grow darker still. His soul will be shadowed by an intenser 
 
v.] Recapitulation. 6^ 
 
 night. But the sense that there is a God behind and above 
 the cloud will never fail him. Ah I we can but say, that 
 to that weary soul there could have come some glimpse of 
 Him whom prophets and kings desired to see, some gracious 
 revelation of a Father's love ; that he could have laid his hand 
 on the very hem of the garment of Him whose coming in the 
 flesh we soon shall celebrate. 
 
 [December 6, 1884.] 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 It is possible that some among those whom I am 
 addressing may have set themselves at one time or another 
 in their lives, perhaps quite recently, to read through the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes. In spite of occasional obscurities, they 
 have, doubtless, been able to recognise some continuity of 
 thought, some approach to method, in the first two chapters. 
 But as they enter on the third, all seems changed. It is not 
 only that the personality, real or assumed, of King Solomon 
 as the speaker, is entirely dropped : it is not merely that 
 everything approaching the form of personal reminiscences, 
 or autobiographical confessions, is henceforth absent; they pass 
 at once into an entirely different atmosphere alike of thought 
 and of style. They find themselves suddenly confronted, from 
 the very first verse, with a series of epigrammatic aphorisms, 
 reminding them of the central portion of the Book of 
 Proverbs. Here, as there, each of these aphorisms is thrown 
 into the form of a couplet or distich, a verse containing two 
 lines, one answering to another with that parallelism, or cor- 
 respondence, that rhyme, as it were, not of sound but of 
 sense, in which Hebrew poetry so largely consists. In this 
 chapter we shall find that each of these 'proverbs' will 
 begin with the same word, and will enforce one and the same 
 lesson. It is a lesson which is common alike to the experience 
 of Hebrew, Greek, and Englishman ; taught alike by the 
 Greek sage and by our own Shakespeare. It tells us that to 
 everything there is a season, a time ; that there is a right 
 moment to every purpose under heaven. 
 
 The truth is conveyed, first of all, in the opening verse, and 
 
VI,] Chapter iii. t-8. 67 
 
 is repeated under various forms, covering the manifold 
 occupations and interests of human life, through eight verses. 
 
 To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose 
 under the heaven : 
 
 A time to be born, and a time to die ; 
 
 A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that tvhich is planted ; 
 
 A time to kill, and a tirne to heal ; 
 
 A time to break down, and a time to build up ; 
 
 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; 
 
 A time to mour7i, and a time to dance ; 
 
 A time to cast away stones, and a tivie to gather stones 
 together ; 
 
 A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing ; 
 
 A time to get, and a time to lose ; 
 
 A time to keep, and a time to cast away ; 
 
 A time to rend, and a time to sew ; 
 
 A time to keep silence, and a time to speak ; 
 
 A time to love, and a time to hate ; 
 
 A time of war, atid a time of peace. 
 
 Now the meaning of these verses, taken separately, is clear 
 enough ; but as we read them through we naturally ask, what 
 place do these repeated adages and maxims — these common 
 truisms we might even add — hold in the course of the 
 writer's thoughts ? If all is vanity, if all things are proved to 
 be hollow, why waste his breath in telling us, with a some- 
 what tedious iteration, that just as birih and death, and war 
 and peace, come at their allotted time in the life of the indi- 
 vidual or of the nation, so there is a fit time for every act, 
 however voluntary, and for every emotion, however natural ? 
 
 It would be easy to imitate the great majority of older 
 commentators, and to dismiss the really important question of 
 the general bearing of this string of aphorisms, placed side 
 by side with an Oriental prolixity, and to divert your attention 
 by afifixing all kinds of mystical, historical, and theological 
 senses to each of the separate combinations of words and 
 
 F 2 
 
68 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vi. 
 
 images in which the same lesson is successively enforced. 
 But I will not try to find, with Christian commentators, 
 an allusion to the doctrine of Justification by Faith or 
 Works, in 'gathering and casting away stones;' or, with 
 Rabbinical writers, to the duty of putting to death by 
 stoning disobedient children, or to the wisdom of throwing 
 overboard a cargo in a storm. But I will ask, why do we 
 meet this fragment of the Book of Proverbs in a place that 
 seems of all others so unsuited to its introduction ; breaking 
 up, as it does, the natural progress of the writer's thoughts, 
 as a Greek chorus suspends, for other reasons, the action of 
 a Greek tragedy ? In answering this question, we must not 
 forget how familiar these two-fold sententious maxims, in 
 which one man's insight gathers up the experience of many, 
 were to the Jewish mind ; or how natural their use would be 
 to one who wrote in the school, so to speak, of the royal and 
 traditional master of Proverbs, King Solomon; or again, 
 how dear they are at this moment to the kindred Arab races. 
 I may remind you also how often our Lord Himself mingled 
 them with His teaching : — 
 
 Give not that which is holy unto dogs ^, 
 Neither cast ye your pearls before swine. 
 
 Aerain : 
 
 He that is not with Me is against Me^, 
 
 He that gather eth not with Me scatter eth abroad. 
 
 And secondly, as to the more important question, their 
 meaning here. Is it not this ? ' There is a law and order 
 in all things,' they seem to say : ' a fitness and unfitness, 
 could we but see it. Life, death, destruction, production, 
 growth, decay, sorrow, joy, loss, gain, come at fixed times. 
 We cannot alter these times any more than we can call up 
 winter's snows in the midst of summer.' It seems a feeling 
 akin to that which we call Fatalism; or rather, as that 
 implies some power called Fate, apart from God, of a pre- 
 ^ St. Matthew vii. 6. ^ St. Matthew xii. 30. 
 
VI.] Chapter iii. 1-9. 69 
 
 determined, necessary course of things, so ordained by the 
 Lord of human history as to leave no scope for human 
 freedom. All things are ordered, fixed, settled, timed and 
 dated, as it were, beforehand. Even as in the first chapter 
 he had said that each group of events is repeated in regular 
 cycle ; that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, new beneath 
 the sun ; so here, he adds, the revolution proceeds with un- 
 deviating, clockwork, steady regularity. 
 
 Among Western nations, and here in England, it is quite 
 true that, whatever may be men's theories as to the freedom 
 or absence of freedom of the human will, they act them- 
 selves and treat others as free agents. Men may, as did 
 Milton's fallen angels, sit apart ' on a hill retired ' — 
 
 'And reason high 
 Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and Fate, 
 Fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute. 
 And find no end, in wandering mazes lost^' 
 
 But when they come down from that ' hill retired,' to mix 
 with the crowds of living, erring, striving, suffering men in the 
 world below, they leave their theories and their speculations 
 behind them. Our writer, however, is not speaking here of the 
 abstract freedom of the human will, but rather of the value or 
 worthlessness of human action. To his saddened eye the law 
 of order and recurrence which he sees is pressed at once to its 
 mournful and logical conclusion. He sees no room for the 
 development of human character in contact with these fixed 
 phenomena and these iron laws of life ; and thus he ends his 
 string of proverbial couplets by asking, in verse 9, not for the 
 first time, the despairing question. What profit hath he that 
 worketh in that wherein he laboureth? What gain has the 
 toiler, imprisoned within these remorseless laws, from all his 
 toil ? It is not, remember, the higher warning yet to come 
 from lips divine, the lesson against over-toil, over-anxiety, 
 drawn from the bright lilies that clothed the fields of Palestine 
 » 'Paradise Lost,' Bk. ii. 559. 
 
v^ 
 
 70 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vi. 
 
 with a splendour beyond that of Solomon in all his glory. 
 He is not leading up to words of tenderness such as, 
 Your heavenly Father careth for you. It is just the dark 
 thought that toil is vain, for man is in face of forces which he 
 cannot read, or mould, or bend. And then, in the tenth verse, 
 he speaks again in his own person: ' I,' he says, 'even I, have 
 looked with anxious eyes into the various forms of an activity 
 which, profitless as it is, God has assigned to the sons of men.' 
 / have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men 
 to be exercised in it. It is a pathetic touch, this careful survey 
 of mankind all busied in that which cannot profit ; and the 
 words which follow, could we only be certain that we grasped 
 firm their true meaning, are full of a mournful, but suggestive 
 poetry. He has made, he says in the eleventh verse, all 
 things around man fair. He hath made eveiything beautiful in 
 his time : in its place and season. For a moment the sense 
 of the beauty of created things, of which there seemed no 
 perception in the opening chapter, seems to cross his soul. 
 We shall find a trace of it again. The world, he says, in 
 which He has placed man, is no wild waste, but of exceeding 
 beauty. Do our thoughts go back for a moment from these 
 darkened skies to some distant scene — to bright skies, or 
 •snowy mountains, or heathery moorland, or green pastures, 
 or sparkling sea.? Then, he adds, not, we have reason to 
 believe, as our translation runs, he has set the world^, but, 
 ' he has set eternity, a sense of the infinite, in man's heart ; 
 yet so that he cannot read, cannot understand, the work that 
 God doeth from the beginning to the end.' Let me read the 
 verse : also he hath set eternity, or the infinite, in their heart, so 
 that no man can find out the work that God ?naketh {doeth) from 
 the beginning to the end. 
 
 What does he say ? Is it this .^ He has framed man to 
 lead a life of labour and activity ; encaged him in a world of 
 
 ' The Revised Version retains ' the world ' in the text, but gives 
 ' eternity ' in the margin. 
 
VI.] Chapter iii. 10-13. 7^ 
 
 order and of beauty. Within him is a sense of the endless, 
 the infinite, the absolute, that yearns out to this Order and this 
 Beauty. Yet he cannot satisfy this sense, he cannot read 
 God's works. It is a thought, a feeling, common to our race ; 
 
 'those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; ' 
 
 that 
 
 that 
 
 'Vague emotion of delight 
 In gazing up an Alpine height,' 
 
 ' Yearning to the lamps of night.' 
 
 God has set before man the desire to read the ' riddle of the 
 
 painful earth,' but has withheld the key. 
 
 'The end and the beginning vex 
 His spirit, many things perplex.' 
 
 It is a sigh that has been heaved, not only in the days whether 
 of Solomon or of one who used his name, but wherever the 
 hum.an soul has tried to pierce the darkness that environs it. 
 
 But if, as seems most probable, this is the Preacher's 
 thought, he comes back at once to the one single lesson of 
 practice which he has yet drawn. Man's toil may, or may 
 not, be vain ; that depends on laws and sequences which he 
 cannot master, which he did not frame. Man's eye will 
 never read the mysteries that surround him. Let him there- 
 fore cease to repine and — he gives the advice for the second 
 time — recognise the one good thing within his reach. There 
 is one thing good, viz. to rejoice, be cheerful, and to do good 
 (the phrase, I fear, answers to our well-doing in its sense of 
 happiness) in his life, while his brief day lasts. Let him eat 
 and drink, and enjoy the fruit of his labour. It is the gift of ^ 
 God (vv. 12, 13). 
 
 I need scarcely tell you that those who are not content 
 to take the speaker's words as they find them, use them 
 here as a vehicle for thoughts absolutely at variance with 
 their plain meaning. ' Rejoicing ' means, * rejoicing in 
 
72 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vi. 
 
 the study of the Law,' says the pious Rabbi. ' Eating and 
 drinking' must surely mean 'the partaking of the blessed 
 Sacrament/ says the Christian Father, But to him who 
 would ask, first of all, what is the real thought set before us on 
 the open page, there is no evading the fact that, so far as the 
 Preacher has yet advanced, he finds no better solace for 
 poor mankind, — miseris mortalibus, as Virgil, echoing the 
 words of Homer, described our race, — than simple and 
 v/^ thankful enjoyment of the fruits of toil. It is the gentler 
 and sweeter side of the adage from whose degrading form 
 St. Paul, in presence of the Cross and Resurrection of his 
 Lord, shrank with such horror. ' Let us eat and drink, 
 for to-morrow we die ^.' / know, says our Preacher in verses 
 12 and 13, that there is no good in them, but for a man to 
 rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should 
 eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift 
 of God. So run his words. We feel at once that there may 
 possibly have been times and seasons when such advice was 
 the best that could be found. ' There is,' he has told us 
 just now, ' a time for all things ' — 
 
 A time to plant, a time to pluck up ; 
 
 A time to break down, and a time to build up. 
 May we not say, in very sacred words, that ' unless such 
 times had been shortened ' man's spiritual nature must have 
 been in danger of mournful shipwreck ? 
 
 But we return to the passage. ' Let man,' he says, ' enjoy 
 God's gift. It is the gift of One whose will is resistless, 
 whose laws are unchangeable.* And he goes on in verse 14, 
 / know that whatsoever God doeth it shall be for ever ; nothing 
 can be put to it (nothing added), nor anything taken from it : 
 and God doeth it, that men should fear before Him. He 
 displays His power to make men bend before it. It is not, 
 you will observe, God's undeviating righteousness, still less His 
 love, but His power, that is here put forward ; it is not man's 
 ^ 1 Cor. XV. 32. 
 
VI.] Chapter iii. 12-15. 73 
 
 sinfulness, but his powerlessness, that is the lesson dwelt on. 
 And once more, in verse 15, he dwells on the unvarying, un- 
 changeable order that marshals the course of the world's history, 
 That which hath been is now ; 
 And that which is to be hath already been. 
 ' There is nothing new,' he has already said, ' under the sun.' 
 And God, he goes on, requireth — or, rather, recalls, bringeth 
 back in due time — that which is past, that which has fled on 
 the wings of time. The old drama is played out, in the old 
 way, by other actors. 
 
 The lesson to cheerfulness under such bidding seems a 
 hard one. Men have recited it over the wine-cup in old 
 times and new, in East and West. But the human heart, 
 with such shadows gathering in the background, has recog- 
 nised its hollowness, and again and again has put back the 
 anodyne from its lips. Let us, too, pass it by, even as our 
 Preacher does. 
 
 For we have now to penetrate more deeply into the sources 
 of his unabated sadness. We shall see other phantoms, 
 more grisly than those which were born within his own 
 bosom, rise up to mar the joy which he commends. 
 
 And moreover, he says, in verse 16, and with these two 
 simple conjunctions he passes into another and a different 
 gallery of the dark pictures of life through which he leads us. 
 He is no longer gazing sadly on an unchanging earth, and 
 a weary round of suns, and winds, and waters, and a spreading 
 expanse of human graves. He is no longer experimentalizing, 
 so to speak, on his own soul ; ' roaming with a hungry heart' 
 through the realms of knowledge or of pleasure. Nor, again, 
 is he contemplating any longer that series of unchanging 
 laws, the sense of which chills and paralyses him. He simply 
 looks out on the ordinary course of daily life, and sees 
 an ill-ordered world, * a world,' to use the words of an 
 honoured leader of modern science, 'full not of pain only, 
 but of injustice, in which the weakest goes to the wall. 
 
y 
 
 74 Lectures 07i Ecclesiastes. [vi. 
 
 And moreover, he says, in verse i6, And moreover I saw 
 under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there ; 
 and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there. We 
 f Englishmen can hardly enter into the full bitterness of his 
 words. We may question, we may criticise, we may blame 
 from time to time, this or that magisterial or judicial decision ; 
 but we have a profound belief that the administration of 
 justice in our own land, and in its dependencies, is, and has 
 long been, pure and impartial. We can hardly realize the 
 general demoralisation, the poison introduced into the very 
 arteries and veins of the social system, when once such 
 administration becomes thoroughly corrupt. Still less can 
 we realize the misery that results, when not corruption only, 
 but corruption and tyranny, take their places on the seat of 
 justice ; when that earthly Law which confronts men in their 
 daily life is no longer the reflection of that of which our own 
 Hooker says, that ' its seat is in the bosom of God, and its 
 voice the harmony of the universe,' but is the embodiment of 
 all wickedness and all injustice. May we guard with righteous 
 jealousy the heritage into which we have entered 1 May we 
 carry the blessings of pure justice and fair dealing w'herever 
 our flag flies or our language is spoken. May our children pass 
 it on unimpaired to their children's children. But you hardly 
 need to be reminded that millions of human beings still live 
 under a rule to which the simple words that I have just read, 
 
 / saw under the sun the place of judgment that wickedttess 
 was there, 
 
 And the place of righteousness that iiiiquity was there, 
 are still fully applicable. And we know how deep was 
 the yearning for righteousness on the seat of justice in the 
 heart of the Jewish nation ; how often it finds a voice in 
 Psalmist and in Prophet. You remember how, in the noble 
 picture of the ideal King in the 72 nd Psalm, we have the 
 emphatic words, recurring again and again, that paint the 
 attribute of Justice on the bench, He shall judge thy people 
 
VI.] Chapter iii. 16. 75 
 
 iviih righteousness, and thy poor with judgnicnt. He shall 
 judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the 
 needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. For he shall de- 
 liver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath 
 no helper. It is a Psalm of which, as you will see by the 
 heading in your Bibles, tradition spoke as David's prayer for 
 Solomon. And you know how the Prophet, in the Evening 
 Lesson for the Second Sunday in Advent, read here so lately, 
 speaks of one who 
 
 Shall not Judge after the sight of his eyes, 
 Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, 
 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, 
 And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth ^ 
 Such texts give a livelier meaning to such words as shall 
 the fudge of all the earth do wrong ? Shall God imitate 
 this corrupt herd of judges ? And they even lend a force 
 to our Lord's parable of the Unjust Judge, as drawn, like 
 all His other teaching, from the familiar experience of daily 
 life. I have heard it said, since I last spoke here, by one 
 who has a rare knowledge of Oriental life, that if one known 
 to be incorruptible and all-powerful were to mount his horse 
 in the streets of Constantinople, and make his way through 
 realm after realm under Eastern governments, his course 
 would be lined from first to last with suppliants for mere 
 justice ; his ears deafened with the cry of that poor woman 
 in the parable, ' give me justice against my adversary.' 
 
 I have spoken at this length on the subject in order that 
 we may clearly realize the effect on the mind of him whose 
 words we are considering, of the spectacle, the bewildering 
 and baffling spectacle, on which he looked; an Eastern 
 state, where unrighteousness and corruption were in full 
 possession of unlimited power. Let me read the words in 
 which he will emphasise in the next chapter what he has seen, 
 So I returned, he will say, and considered all the oppressions 
 ' Isaiah xi. 3, 4. 
 
y6 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [Vi. 
 
 that are done under the sun : and behold the tears of such as 
 were oppressed, and they had no comforter ; and on the side 
 of their oppressors there was power ; but they had no comforter'^. 
 What a picture of human society ! Yet it is a sight such as 
 
 i under many an Eastern government might still be seen. 
 
 ' The words would find an echo from thousands of some race, 
 ruled — shall we say ? — by a Mahommedan conqueror, possi- 
 bly from some nominally Christian land, where the mind of 
 the ruling class is sapped by corruption, and demoralized by 
 suspicion and personal fear. Could such words, let me ask 
 once more, have come from the lips of a Solomon ; of a 
 king whose reign was proverbial for the prosperity of his well- 
 ordered empire; whose one sigh in his youth had been 'to 
 judge rightly this thy great people^;' whose early fame rested 
 on his righteous judgments ? Can we believe that, as in his 
 grey hairs he looked out from his palace, or travelled from 
 town to town, he saw, and sadly acquiesced in, one dead 
 level of cruel and unrighteous administration, of the prostitu- 
 tion of that justice which was so dear to his own youth and 
 to the instincts of his nation ? Are we to believe that into the 
 glowing picture given of his reign by the sacred historian we 
 must interpolate the words, From Dan even unto Beersheba 
 there was injustice on the seat of justice, and the poor were 
 oppressed, and there was no helper ? If so, well might we, in 
 the name of human nature, echo the cry of the Northern tribes, 
 'To your tents, O Israel! now see to thine own house, David ^.' 
 Let me return to the words before us. He whose moody 
 thoughts we are following looked out on this depressing sight 
 of misrule and misery. There rose, he tells us, within him a 
 y' gleam of hope. 
 
 I said in mine heart, he says in verse 17, God shall judge 
 
 the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time therefor every 
 
 I purpose and for every work. It is the first glimpse that we 
 
 I have seen of such a hope among the dark thoughts that cross 
 
 I Mv. I. 2 I Kings iii. 9. ^ i Kings xii. 16. 
 
VI.] Chapter iii. 17-21. 77 
 
 him. There, before God's throne — there, not here — every 
 purpose, every thought, and every deed shall have its time, its 
 hour, i. e. of trial and retribution. But the hope eludes his 
 grasp ; and there comes in its place another and a sadder 
 voice. / said, he goes on immediately, / said in mine heart 
 concerning the estate, the high estate, of the sons of men, that it 
 was just this, that God might manifest them, show them what 
 they really were, and that they might see that they themselves 
 are beasts. It is, he says, man's sad prerogative to be conscious 
 of his doom. And then, in line after Hue, he dwells upon and 
 enforces the gloomy and despairing verdict of his heart, that 
 man and beast share the same being, draw the same breath, 
 are animated by the same life, spring from the same source, 
 go back to the same elements. For that which befalleth the 
 sons of men befalleth beasts ; even one thing befalleth them : as 
 the one dieth, so dieth the other : yea, they have all one breath ; 
 so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast : for all is 
 VANITY. All go unto one place ; all are of the dust, and all 
 turn to dust again (vv. 19, 20). ' All is vanity.' And then, 
 as though in answer to some faint suggestion of a larger 
 hope. Who knoweth, he says very sadly inverse 21, whether — 
 so the best authorities, so all the ancient versions ^— Pf%<? 
 knoweth whether the spirit of man goeth upward, and the spirit 
 of the beast goeth downward to the earth? In all that we see 
 their end is the same ; all go unto one place — the grave ; all 
 are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Of the rest we 
 know nothing ; our hopes are based upon an idle fancy. 
 
 He seems to have touched the very nadir of misery and 
 despair. Yet even darker thoughts are in store. ' What hope 
 of shelter or redress ? ' He turns once more from these sights 
 of injustice, from these baffled hopes, from this ache and 
 pain within. For the third time he preaches the lesson of 
 cheerful enjoyment of the fruit of man's labour. Since such 
 a cloud, he says, hangs over the future, take that portion 
 
 ^ So also the Revised Version. 
 
78 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. 
 
 which God has allotted thee. It is thy portion ; mourn and 
 wail no longer, but enjoy it cheerfully. Wherefore I perceive 
 that there is nothing better (so ends the chapter) than that a man 
 should rejoice in his own works; for that, not the future, is his 
 portion ; for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him P 
 
 As we listen to his words, and enter into the deep dejection 
 out of which they spring, we feel a certain touch — slight it 
 may be, yet a touch — of a somewhat higher teaching than we 
 at first recognised. We need not do violence to phrase after 
 phrase, and force into words of despair and negation thoughts 
 of hope and affirmation. But we feel that we are in the 
 presence of one who has the germ given him of some courage, 
 equanimity, and calmness, which may grow into other and 
 better things. His spirit is torn by, suffers with, all the pangs 
 that beset the enquiring human heart. He feels for all the 
 woes of humanity ; cannot put them by and fly to the wine- 
 cup and crown himself with garlands. He has hated life ; yet 
 he will not lose his courage. ' Be of good cheer,' he says 
 even in his dark hour ; ' work on, and enjoy the fruits of 
 work ; it is thy portion. Do not curse God and die.' 
 
 There is a certain dignity in words that seemed at first 
 sight almost frivolous, a mere trifling with life's sorrows. We 
 shall see what trials are yet in store for him. We see at least 
 that he is not merely, or wholly, a cold-blooded, calculating, 
 epicurean, turning his eyes from life's trials, but one who, as 
 typifying and embodying the sad perplexities of so many of his 
 fellow human workers, might well win the pity of the ' Man 
 of Sorrows and acquainted with grief;' Whose heart yearned 
 over the sorrowful ; Who had words of eternal life for those 
 who said, 'Lord, to whom shall we go?'; Who bore with 
 all the infirmities of poor human nature, and Who scarcely 
 uttered a word of severity or sternness, except to rebuke 
 falsehood and to unmask hypocrisy. 
 
 [December 13, 1884.] 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 Chapters IV, V. 
 
 We paused, when we met last, at the point where our 
 Preacher, after a steady outlook on the seeming misrule of 
 the world around him, had tried to comfort himself under 
 the dark thoughts which the sight suggested. He turned for 
 refuge to the sense of a day o!" ultimate redress and retri- 
 bution, when the righteous and the wicked should alike answer 
 for all their thoughts and all their acts before the tribunal of 
 a God of righteousness. 
 
 But the solace was, as we saw, short-lived. It was 
 succeeded by a gloomy train of blank misgivings. We may 
 find their parallel in the confessions of ancient and modern 
 doubters ; but we may well be startled at finding them, 
 urged with such terrible and relentless force, in the pages of 
 the Old Testament. 
 
 Can it be, he says, that it is God's purpose that man 
 should excel the lower creation just in this, that he should 
 feel the bitterness of his doom ? That he should suffer, or 
 see suffering, endure wrong, or see it triumphant around 
 him ; be conscious, in a way denied to the beast or the bird, 
 of the moral disorder and imperfections of life, and be taught 
 at the same time that this world, so strangely out of joint, is 
 his only stage, the one sphere in which his lot is cast.? It 
 seems at least, he says, that save this sad pre-eminence, man 
 is on a level with all lower forms of life. None, at all 
 events, knows, none can assure him, that death is not the 
 ' be all and the end all ' of his short existence. 
 
 ' Ah, well ! ' he adds, ' if so, let him meet his fate with 
 calmness, or more, with cheerfulness. Since none can show 
 
So Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vii. 
 
 him what lies beyond, let him take what comfort is attainable 
 in the immediate result of the labour of his hands or brain, 
 and ask no more.' If you read the four verses — the eighteenth 
 to the twenty-first of chapter iii — you will see that I have 
 in no way* overstated his meaning, but have given you a fair 
 summary of the conclusions that he has so far reached. 
 
 It is not the last time, my friends, that the world has been 
 told that the higher the organization, the greater the feeling 
 of a want of correspondence between itself and that which 
 environs it ; that as man emerges from the mere hard struggle 
 for subsistence, questions will inevitably come to him which 
 he cannot answer ; that he Ivill feel himself in the presence 
 of contradictions which he cannot reconcile; and that he 
 will find at last that mere consciousness involves frustration 
 and suffering, till he comes to pronounce existence itself to 
 be an evil. The only remedy, he has been told, if remedy 
 there is, lies in facing the fact that he is disinherited of his 
 supposed hopes, and in making the most of such poor 
 palHatives as life can offer. Let him work, others will tell 
 him, and rejoice in his works — fill up life — shall we say ? — 
 with politics, literature, art, and commerce, with ambition or 
 science, with friendship or love. The world will be a good 
 world still. Above all, let him turn his eyes from the other 
 world. For who can bring him io see what shall be after him ? 
 How often may you have heard, or read, such counsel in 
 your own day? 
 
 But hardly has the thinker — who takes his place in this 
 great record of God's dealings with the human soul, in virtue 
 of showing to us a stage in the spiritual history of our race — 
 a type of other souls as sad as he — hardly has he, for the 
 third time, put before himself and others this form of comfort 
 than he finds the staff ghde, as it were, from his hands. He 
 sinks down into a lower level, from which even the poor strip 
 of sky which he saw just now becomes dark and clouded. 
 / turned again, he says, — and then comes the despairing sen- 
 
VI].] Chapter iv. i. 8i 
 
 tence with which the fourth chapter opens and which I read 
 by anticipation a week ago. So I relurfied, and considered 
 all the oppressions /hat are dojte under the sim : and behold 
 the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter ; 
 and on the side of their oppressors there was pozver ; but they 
 had 710 comforter. 
 
 ' How can a man rejoice, even if untouched himself, he 
 seems to say, who sees such sights ? ' It is not merely the 
 denial, the perversion, of justice, but the broad surface of the 
 earth — all beneath the sun — seems to him one scene of cruelty 
 and oppression. From wide plains, and crowded cities, go 
 up to heaven, 
 
 'A lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.' 
 
 Can this bitter experience be drawn, I asked in passing, 
 from the golden days of Solomon, from the high noon of 
 Hebrew prosperity, as sketched in the Book of Kings ? He 
 who utters them sees nothing but violence and cruelty on 
 the one hand, the tears of the oppressed on the other ; a 
 system, firmly established and deeply rooted all round him, 
 of unrighteous force and arbitrary rule. And the words have 
 a strange pathos in their very calmness, as we notice the 
 twice repeated phrase ; ' and they had no comforter.' So 
 ruthless, so remorseless, the oppressor's sway, that none 
 dare even show commiseration to the victims of his tyranny. 
 Those very proofs of the sympathy which Hebrew felt and 
 feels for Hebrew, which are so marked a feature in that his- 
 toric race even here and now ; which ages ago drew ' much 
 people ' to follow the bier of the widow's only son outside the 
 gates of Nain, or the throng of friends to the house of the 
 sisters at Bethany ' to comfort them concerning their brother,' 
 even these were denied. 
 
 Is this, we may well ask, the picture, drawn by himself, of 
 the rule of a native prince, ruling over an Israel, ' eating and 
 drinking and making merry ' in the new-found sense of pros- 
 perity, riches, and empire ? 
 
 G 
 
82 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vii. 
 
 And what is the effect, let us now ask, of such a sight upon 
 the mind of this son of Abraham ? No plaintive cry to the 
 God of Abraham and Isaac, or to the Jehovah of Mount Sinai, 
 such as bursts so often from the lips of Psalmist and of 
 Prophet, no appeal to the glories of the past, or to the hopes 
 of the future ? Do we hear the cry Hath God forgotten to be 
 gracious ? Hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies ? Is 
 His mercy clean gone for ever ? Doth His promise come utterly 
 to an end, for evermore ^? 
 
 No 1 he has not the strength, so to speak, not the spiritual 
 vitality left for this. Such passion, such faith we may even 
 say, is dead within him. He draws from it only a sadder 
 lesson still. The dead, he concludes, are happier than the 
 living ; ' 'tis better not to be : ' happier those who have never 
 seen the light ; to see the light is but ' to see all the evil that 
 is wrought beneath the sun.' The mere sight of the disorder, 
 misrule, and suffering of this weary world makes life intoler- 
 able. Listen to him in the verses that follow. 
 
 Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more 
 than the living which are yet alive. 
 
 Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, he 
 who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun 
 (vv. 2, 3). 
 
 Those who have taken sufficient interest in the subject to 
 follow at all closely in their Bibles what has been thus far said, 
 will see, I am sure, that I am giving them a fair statement, not 
 of what we should expect, or wish, to find in the teaching of 
 one whom we have been accustomed to call 'the Preacher,' 
 or ' the Wise man ' of the Old Testament ; but of what we 
 Christians, at this Christmas season, actually have before 
 us in these musings of a Hebrew soul, unshaken in its 
 belief in a Divine Ruler of the universe, but sadly facing the 
 terrible problems of a time of darkness, and yearning vainly 
 for a light not yet come into the world. 
 ^ Ps. Ixxvii. 9, 8. 
 
VII.] Chapter iv. 2, 3, 4-12. 83 
 
 And now we shall see him, after this groan of despair, turn 
 aside from these haunting and irrepressible phantoms of the 
 soul. He can bear them no longer ; he puts them aside for 
 a little while. His mood is still bitter; but it is no longer on 
 the oppressions and cruelty of life that he fixes his eye, but 
 on its littleness, its mutual jealousies, its greed, its strange 
 reverses, its shams and hollowness. 
 
 The Preacher puts on the garb of the Satirist, and lashes 
 the pettiness, and the follies, and the vain hurry of mankind. 
 He tells us first, how, when good work is done, envy and 
 detraction at once show their poisoned fangs. Again, he 
 tells us in verse 4, / cottst'dered all travail, and every right 
 work, that for this a inati is envied of his neighbour. Even 
 ' the fool,' always mentioned in Psalms and Proverbs with a 
 fierce contempt that explains our Lord's warning in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, has in his ^iWy foldijtg of the hands 
 more enjoyment ^ than many a restless toiler. Even men's 
 contempt of the fool is folly. Better, he cries, in verse 6, an 
 handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail 
 and vexation of spirit. And next, he draws a picture, 
 sketched perhaps from the experience of an age of distrust 
 and insecurity, of the solitary friendless money-maker, of a 
 Shylock without even a Jessica, of an Isaac of York with no 
 faithful Rebecca. Then I returned, and I saw vanity under 
 the sun. There is one alone, and there is not a second ; yea, he 
 hath neither child nor brother : yet is there no end of all his 
 labour ; neither is his eye satisfied with riches ; neither sailh 
 he. For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good ? This 
 is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail (vv. 7, 8). And 
 then, beneath the portrait, he writes, as it were, a series of 
 mottoes, adage after adage, on the misery and folly of a 
 friendless life. They begin with Two are better than one, in 
 verse 9 ; they end with a threefold cord is not quickly broken 
 
 ' I have followed Dr. Ginsburg's interpretation : and yet eateth meet 
 of his owjt. The R. V. introduces no change. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vii. 
 
 in verse 12. And this said, he turns to remind his readers 
 or hearers of the strange vicissitudes to which kings are 
 liable, even despotic kings. He brings before us, in verse 13, 
 the image of the old and foolish king, who will no viore be 
 adjnonished ; debauched by long tenure of a power to which 
 he was born, and scorning advice and warning. We see 
 him driven from his throne, stripped of his riches, becoming 
 in his grey hairs a beggar, and we think, perhaps of the sad 
 end of the monarch whose youthful portrait^ hangs here close 
 by us, and of the exiled Bolingbroke, who took his place : Out 
 of prisoft one cometh to reign, whereas, he that is born itt his 
 kingdom, born in sovereignly, become th poor. 
 
 ' The poor and oppressed envy,' he seems to say, ' royal 
 state. Need they do so ? ' 
 
 And then he sees another step, a step this time from the 
 dungeon to the throne. Thousands, he says, pay homage to 
 the new darling of his people. There is no end, he says, to 
 those ivho crowd around him ^. How the picture in Shake- 
 speare rushes to our minds ^. Yet even this, too, ends in 
 nothingness. The hero of his generation is soon forgotten. 
 Thty also that come after shall not rejoice in hi?n. All fades 
 and passes into oblivion. The world is full of that which 
 satisfieth not. This climbing to the heights of power and 
 
 ^ The famous painting of Richard II in his coronation robes, seated 
 in King Edward's chair, hangs not far from the pulpit at the Abbey. 
 
 ^ I saw alt tJie living which walJi under the smi, that they were with 
 ttie yotith, tJie second, that stood up in Ids stead (v. 15). R. V. 
 3 Richard II, Act V, Sc. 2. 
 
 Yorli. Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke, 
 Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed 
 Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know, 
 With slow but stately pace kept on his course, 
 Whilst all tongues cried ' God save thee, Bolingbroke ! ' 
 You would have thought the very windows spake, 
 So many greedy looks of young and old 
 (Through casements darted their desiring eyes 
 Upon his visage, and that all the walls 
 With painted imagery had said at once 
 
VII.] Chapters \v. 13-16, v. i. 85 
 
 popularity, this also, surely, this too, is vanity and vexation of 
 spirit {striving after wind, R. V.). 
 
 And then, in the next chapter, with a suddenness that is 
 almost startling, he turns to the realm of religion and religious 
 duties. He conveys his meaning in the form of precepts as 
 to what should be avoided, rather than in pictures of the 
 hollowness of even worship and devotion. He lays down the 
 pen of the Satirist, and resumes something of the voice of the 
 Preacher. 
 
 Keep thy foot, he says in the opening words of chapter v, 
 walk warily and straightly, when thou goest to the house of 
 God. He speaks, you will see, to men familiar as we are 
 with a stated and accustomed ritual, a ritual already tinged 
 with formalism and other evils that wait upon the good 
 and gracious gift of combined and organized worship. 
 
 The words, Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of 
 God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of 
 fools'^: for they consider not that they do evil, are so familiar to 
 us that we forget the ages that have elapsed, and the historical 
 difficulties that they suggest. We quote them, and pious 
 Christians, whose ' house of God ' is, perhaps, some English 
 village church, write them, it may be, in the fly-leaf of their 
 children's Prayer-books, to remind them of a lesson which 
 they will teach till time shall be no more. 
 
 But what is the picture actually before the speaker's eye } 
 Is it the newly-built temple of the son of David, with its 
 central sanctuary into which none but the priest could enter ; 
 
 * Jesu preserve thee ! welcome, Bolingbroke ! ' 
 Whilst he, from the one side to the other turning, 
 Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed's neck, 
 Bespake them thus : ' I thank you, countrymen : ' 
 And thus still doing, thus he pass'd along. 
 
 Ducti. Alack, poor Richard ! where rode he the whilst? 
 
 Compare the Archbishop of York's speech in Henry IV, Pt. II, Act I, 
 
 So. 3. 
 
 ^ For to draw nigli to hear is better than to give the sacrifice of 
 
 fools, R. V. 
 
86 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. [vii. 
 
 its flaming altar on which the sons of Aaron consumed the 
 victims ; its spacious courts, which the pious Israelite 
 rejoiced to tread, and whence he sent up his homage and 
 supplications to the Jehovah of his fathers ? Or is it its 
 humble successor, reared upon ruins, amidst the tears of the 
 aged ^ on the return from the Captivity, not yet restored and 
 enlarged and beautified by the Idumean Herod ? Or is it 
 rather some house of God of another kind ; a Jewish syna- 
 gogue in some distant province, in Persian satrapy or 
 Egyptian city, such as a race that already had begun to be 
 denizens and settlers in all lands beneath the sun, was raising 
 far and wide as centres of prayer, of reading the Law and 
 Prophets, of instruction and of exhortation ? 
 
 Is it the quiet and humble hearing of this reading and this 
 preaching that is better than all the sacrifice of fools ? Or 
 does to hear mean to hearken and to obey ? and have we in 
 another form the very words of the Samuel of old time 
 enforcing the eternal truth. Behold"^ to obey is better than 
 sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rains ? 
 
 I bring before you these questions, not to bewilder or 
 distract, but to open your eyes to the obscurity that always 
 veils the background, comes sometimes to the very foremost 
 front, of the book which we are reading; and to the very 
 manifold and interesting problems which surround us at 
 every step. 
 
 Whatever the accessories of his teaching, we see the truth 
 that lies beneath them. It is an exhortation to a calm and 
 reverent spirit, and, as he goes on, we see something like an 
 anticipation of the teaching of One, ah ! how far, how infinitely, 
 greater than the true or the reputed Solomon who speaks. 
 Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to 
 utter anything before God: for God is in heaven, and thou 
 upon earth: therefore let thy words be few (verse 2). 'Do 
 not multiply words. Keep a watch on the words of thy lips 
 * Ezra iii. 12. * i Sam. xv. 22. 
 
VI I] Chapter v. 2-7. 87 
 
 and on the meditations of thy heart. Thou art a child of 
 earth, and in presence of the God of heaven.' They are the 
 words with which Richard Hooker ends one of the most 
 eloquent of his pages ^. ' Let thy words be few, humble and 
 sincere.' 
 
 For a moment our thoughts go out to the contrast between 
 the Pharisees with their long prayers, and him who said ' Lord, 
 have mercy on me, the sinner ! ' Ah ! that the words which 
 we are spelling out so slowly were as clear as those of that 
 greater Teacher. 
 
 ' Remember,' he goes on to say in verses 3 to 7, which 
 I will put before you in a paraphrase, ' that just as the 
 day's tide of cares and occupations confuses the sleeping 
 brain with a whirl and eddy of disordered images, so in the 
 fool's prayer all the thoughts and wishes of the day rush 
 together in the form of rash and irreverent and low-pitched 
 prayers ^ ; run into an idle clatter of vows and promises, which, 
 when the fever fit of selfish devotion is over, the careless 
 worshipper lets slip for ever.' Do our thoughts travel 
 to the peasant of some Southern race kneeling before his 
 pictured saint, whom he by turns entreats and reproaches ? 
 or to a Louis XI offering his strange vows before his leaden 
 images? or shall we come back to our own hearts.'' Shall 
 we think of our own eager prayers for something that we 
 craved.'' our hasty and unfulfilled vows and resolutions of 
 amendment of life .-' ' Far better,' he reminds the worshippers 
 of his day, ' far better to make no vows, whether of actual 
 sacrifice, or of some period of abstinence, than to vow and 
 break your vow, or come before God's angel, the unseen 
 guardian of God's worship, — the word is thought by some to 
 mean the human priest stationed in the Temple — with a 
 
 ^ ' He is above, and we upon earth ; therefore it behoveth our words 
 to be wary and few.' Eccl. Polity, Bk. I, Ch. 2. 2. 
 
 - For a dream comeih with a nmltitude of business : and a fooV s voice 
 ■with a multitude of "words, R. V. 
 
88 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [vii. 
 
 hollow and prevaricating plea for exemption.' 'To do so,' he 
 adds in verse 6, ' is to brave God's anger.' ' In the many 
 words of many worshippers there may be all the hollowness 
 of idle dreams. Fear thou God' 
 
 With these solemn words, he who has spoken by turns in 
 the character of the sick and disillusioned searcher after 
 knowledge and after pleasure; of the pessimistic and life- 
 weary sigher after annihilation ; of the despairing fatalist ; 
 of the sad agnostic, who sees no knowledge possible of the 
 unknowable world beyond the grave ; of the hopeless mate- 
 rialist, who sees in man nothing beyond his animal organiza- 
 tion ; of the more cheerful commender of such brief enjoyment 
 as life permits ; rises at last to the full stature of the Preacher, 
 if not of filial trust and faith, yet of reverence and awe. 
 Fear thou God. He holds firm at all events, though all around 
 invites to a hopeless scepticism, to the belief in a God who, 
 even though we are to pass away and be forgotten, yet has 
 claims on some deeper feehng than earthly objects can inspire. 
 It is not Christian faith, it is not the soul ' athirst for God, even 
 the living God,' but it is something beyond the reach of those 
 whom in many ways he so resembles, with whom he has in 
 many points such sympathy, those who say, aloud or in their 
 hearts, ' there is no God.' 
 
 So end the meditations of our teacher, be he who he may, 
 of a teacher of the Old Testament, on the subject of worship. 
 Can we do better than compare them for a moment with the 
 words of a Divine Teacher, beginning also with a caution, 
 but ending with the prayer of prayers, addressed to a Father 
 in Heaven ? When thou prayest be not as the hypocrites are . . . 
 ' Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward.' And when 
 ye pray, use not vaiti repetitions (or unmeaning cries) as the 
 heathen do . . . for they think that they shall be heard for their 
 much speakifig. Be ye not there/ore like unto the?n, for your 
 Father knozveth what things ye have need of before ye ask him ^. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. vi. 5-S. 
 
VII.] Chapter v. 7, 8, 9. 89 
 
 Let us, before we separate, glance at so much of the 
 passage which follows as can convey to us any clear sense. 
 
 He passes — by perhaps no unnatural transition — from the 
 worship of God to the government of the world ; to the sad 
 spectacle, I should rather say, of the misgovernment, the 
 misrule, of the world. 
 
 But there is a darkness over his language; and as we read 
 and re-read his words, two distinct voices, two opposite 
 lessons, seem to come out of the cloud which covers them. 
 Both will interest you ; and it may interest you also to notice 
 that the moment our Preacher speaks henceforth on what we 
 may call the politics of his day, his language becomes almost 
 studiedly obscure. Listen to him : If thou seest the 
 oppression of the poor, and violait perverting of judgment and 
 justice in a province, marvel not at the matter : for he that is 
 higher than the highest regardeth ; and there be higher than 
 they (verse 8). Are the words those of hopeless counsel of 
 submission to the inevitable ? I incline to think, to fear, that 
 it must be so. ' If thou seest oppression everywhere, be not 
 overstirred ; let not thy heart move thee to outspoken 
 indignation.' This, doubtless, is the meaning of ' marvel 
 not.' ' It is useless. Above the oppressive satrap is a 
 hierarchy of others. All are alike corrupt !' And is the 
 ninth verse a sigh from the subject of such systematic 
 tyranny for a native king who would care for the husband- 
 man and for husbandry ; for the Jewish yeoman, so tenderly 
 cared for by Mosaic legislation ? Moreover the profit of the 
 earth is for all : the king himself is served by the field'^. Or 
 can all we read be words of consolation and cheering .? ' Be 
 not distressed,' does he say ? ' there are those above who will 
 repress and punish such wrongs. Even the highest of all, 
 the king, the Eastern king, is dependent for his prosperity 
 on the well-doing of the soil.' 
 
 * But tlie profit of a land every way is a king that maketh. himself 
 servant to the field, Revised Version, margin. 
 
90 Lectures on Ecclcsiastes. [vii. 
 
 It is characteristic, at all events, of the familiarity of 
 English-speaking and Protestant races with the language of 
 our version of Scripture, that, absolutely obscure as is the 
 whole passage, doubtful and uncertain to the last degree as 
 is the meaning of individual clauses, yet the httle fragment 
 from them, the profit of the earth is for all, formed in summer 
 last — even as he who now speaks was puzzling over their 
 sense, amidst his books, in a Highland village — the motto 
 for a meeting of Northern crofters demanding a change in 
 Scottish land laws. 
 
 I should fatigue you by attempting to guide you, line by 
 line, through all that follows. The next eight verses are a 
 kind of satire on the ' vanity of vanities," for which the 
 oppressive governor and the unrighteous judge barters his 
 peace of mind, sells his very soul. 
 
 Yet so forcible and picturesque is his language that I 
 cannot dismiss it without one word. 
 
 In verse lo we read. He that loveth silver shall not be 
 satisfied with silver. In how many tongues, in how many 
 ages, has the same trite truth been embodied in proverb, 
 poetry, fable, and story. ' The avaricious shall never find 
 enjoyment, vanity is written on his work.' 
 
 Again, notice verse 1 1 : When goods increase, they are 
 increased that eat them. Do we see the vast Eastern retinue 
 as the man rises in rank and power .»' Shall our thoughts go 
 out to our Indian Empire ? or do we apply the adage in 
 more homely guise to English life ? 
 
 Again, as we read in verse 12, The sleep of a labouring 7nan 
 is sweet whether he eat little or much, can we avoid thinking of 
 the soliloquy of the English king, the ' Bolingbroke,' who 
 died hard by ; of his address to ' Nature's soft nurse ; ' of his 
 envy of the ship-boy rocked and lulled by the tossing of ' the 
 rude imperious surge ^ .? ' 
 
 And he goes on to lash with grim satire the eager and 
 » Henry IV, Pt. II, Act III, Sc. i. 
 
VII.] Chapter V. \o- 20. 91 
 
 corroding care for wealth — the bread eaten in darkness, all the 
 joy of life foregone for the sake of a wealth which may pass 
 in a moment, and leave its master and his heir in beggary, 
 which, at all events, must go at the hour of death. Naked as 
 he came must he go. In all points as he came, so shall he go: 
 and what profit hath he that hath laboured /or the witid ? And 
 once more he comes round in verses 18, 19, 20 — it is the 
 fourth time— to the old refrain. Behold that which I have 
 seen ; he enforces it by dwelling on the result of his own expe- 
 rience, it is good and comely for one to eat and to drifik, and to 
 ejijoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all 
 the days of his life, which God giveth him : for it is his portion. 
 Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, 
 and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, 
 and to rejoice in his labour : this is the gift of God. He ends 
 with words less clear than we could wish : For he shall 
 not much remember the days of his life ; because God afiswereth 
 him in the joy of his heart. Do the last words mean 'he will 
 lose in enjoyment the sad sense of the shortness of life ? ' He 
 will forget the doom of death in the joy, the short-lived joy 
 which God gives him .'' It may be so ; but they are con- 
 fessedly obscure. 
 
 We have gone to-day through some very mingled and 
 even perplexing utterances. It has been a tangled skein that 
 I have not professed wholly to unravel ; gloom, despair, 
 cheerfulness, satire, the teaching of history, wise counsels of 
 reverence and devotion ; again, a sad recognition of the evils 
 of the age, of the insecurity of wealth, the uselessness of toil ; 
 all these, and more than these, have come in turn before us, 
 and still from time to time words of wisdom; and yet we have 
 ended where we were, merely with the repeated call to passing 
 enjoyment. Our Preacher, if such we may call him, does 
 not, cannot, lift our thoughts very high. He cannot dismiss, 
 so to speak, the dark spirits whom he evokes. They crowd 
 round him, and his spell is powerless to send them back. 
 
1/ 
 
 gz Lectures on Ecclesiastes. 
 
 But he has been led up one step. Fear thou God, he 
 says ; yet he adds Httle or nothing to open our hearts to God, 
 to tell who, or what, He is whom we are to reverence, or to 
 teach us how to draw strength or comfort from our fear of 
 Him. 
 
 It is an evil world, he tells us, in accents that may remind 
 us of a voice but lately silent — full of shams and hollowness; 
 Fear thou God. ' Only,' he adds, ' as thy day is short, take 
 what enjoyment God gives thee.' It seems for a moment to 
 be hke, but how unlike when we look beneath the surface, 
 ' Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take 
 thought for the things of itself.' 
 
 There is behind it no such gracious message as ' Fear not, 
 little flock ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the 
 kingdom.' It is but a pale prefigurement of ' Seek ye first 
 the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all other 
 things shall be added unto you.' 
 
 ' That strain I heard was of a higher mood.' 
 
 As we pass, my friends, from this cheerless teaching to the 
 thoughts and services of a Christmas which will have 
 passed before we meet again, may we realize what that 
 Christmas brings us; and enter into the service which to- 
 morrow will bid us ' Rejoice in the Lord alway ; and again 
 I say rejoice.' 
 
 [December 20, 1884.] 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 Chapters VI, VII, VIII. 15. 
 
 At the close of our last study of the Book of Ecclesiastes 
 we left its author at the last verse of his fifth chapter, having 
 once more, for the fourth time, come round to the text that 
 the cheerful enjoyment of the results of his labour was man's 
 best portion here below. It is not that he says ' forget God 
 above and duty below. Live like a hog, since thou diest as 
 the swine die/ But for all that, his teaching is clearly not 
 of a piece with that of Him who bade the thrifty, toiling, 
 anxious Jewish peasant seek, first of all, higher aims than 
 those of the food and raiment of the morrow. 
 
 Such a text is, we feel at once, no Gospel message. It will 
 never regenerate a fallen world, or speak peace to the restless 
 intellect, or to the broken heart. It is scarcely necessary in a 
 sanctuary of Christian worship to dwell on the shortcomings, 
 the imperfections, of such teaching. It is enough to remind 
 you, once more, that it is impossible to represent the teaching 
 of this book as adequate or Christian teaching without doing 
 violence to all in it that is most characteristic and most 
 genuine, without distorting 'the Preacher's' words and wresting 
 his language. I must yet once more press upon you that 
 we have in him one raised up to preserve to us the record of 
 the working of the heart of the Jewish people at a time when 
 God was leading them in their onward pilgrimage through a 
 moral and spiritual wilderness which had its own fiery serpents, 
 its own terrors. It was a time when the light that had illumi- 
 nated their past course was ' fluttering, faint, and low,' all but 
 
94 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 extinguished ; and the dayspring that was yet to rise upon their 
 path was still below the horizon, barely touching from afar 
 one or other of the heavy clouds that hung above them. It 
 is as studied in this sense, it seems to me, and in this sense 
 only, that these strange and mingled utterances, which by 
 turns attract, repel, bewilder, and instruct, will render up 
 their true meaning and assert their place within the covers 
 of our Bibles. It is only so that we can see that these things 
 also ' were written for our instruction.' 
 
 In the three chapters which follow (chapters vi, vii and 
 viii) that meaning, that instruction, is often hard to seize. We 
 see at first sight a mere maze of disconnected reflections ; 
 sometimes unintelligible, sometimes contradictory; some- 
 times prudential, embodied in old famiHar maxims; some- 
 times, on the other hand, exceedingly paradoxical and start- 
 ling ; sometimes intensely and profoundly sad ; passing often 
 into sayings that have become household words. The stream 
 of thought runs at times clear, at times turbid, following a 
 zigzag course through the manifold experiences of life ; here 
 along quiet and flowery meadows, there through a barren and 
 stony w^aste. I shall not, of course, attempt to give you a 
 
 ^ key to all the many difficulties of these chapters. It will be 
 enough if I try to make clear to you, to draw out as plainly 
 as possible, their leading tones. 
 
 He returns, then, in the sixth chapter, to the familiar subject 
 
 V of the hollowness, the vanity, of men's pursuits. Already, it 
 would seem, the descendants of the patriarchs, and of the 
 shepherd race whose swords had subdued the fierce tribes of 
 Palestine, had, in default of the inspiring interests of national 
 life, advanced far in that pursuit of wealth— in the devotion 
 
 / to, and mastery of, the arts which secure wealth — which was 
 to become, under similar circumstances, their ruling charac- 
 teristic in the eyes of nations yet unborn. ' I have looked 
 out,' he says in verse i, ' as from my post of observation, and 
 seen beneath the sun a sorry sight. Here one heaps up 
 
VIII.] Chapta- vi. i. 95 
 
 wealth, and all that wealth can bring of happiness,' so that he 
 ivanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth,yet Godgiveth 
 him not the poiver to eat thereof, as we should say, to enjoy it. 
 A stranger, some one not of his own blood, not even the son 
 of his adoption, eateth it, 'enjoys it, and all his toil is wasted. 
 This is vanity, and more, an evil disease. It is a canker at 
 the very root of the tree of life.' 
 
 ' Nay more,' he goes on in verse 3, ' were it otherwise, \ 
 were a man surrounded by a host of sons, and life indefinitely 
 prolonged \ yet, if God give him not the gift of enjoyment, 
 mere life, mere riches, mere family blessings, profit him 
 nothing ; they do not bring to his soul the one thing that he 
 needs. The untimely birth that comes forth from the dark- 
 ness, and passes back into the everlasting night, unnamed ^ 
 and forgotten, is better than he : hath a more restful existence, 
 is less uneasy, less at variance with itself, than he who lives, 
 were it for twice a thousand years, in unsatisfied cravings.' 
 That nameless life hath 7iot seen the sun, nor known a?iy thing, yet 
 hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand 
 years twice told, yet hath he seen no good : do not all go to one 
 place .^VQV&Q 6). That joyless life will end at last, end in the same y 
 nothingness that is the doom of fool and wise, of poverty and 
 greatness ; men coil and toil and are never satisfied ; all the 
 labour of matt is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. 
 Better, he cries, is the sight of the eyes than the wandering 
 of the desire ; better one hour's grasp of substantial happi- 
 ness than endless wandering after unattainable ends. That 
 ivhich hath been, he goes on mournfully, was already named 
 (verse 10). Man's fate was fixed long ago. He cannot contend 
 with a power far above him. There be many things that increase 
 vanity; weakh, knowledge, pleasure, all human objects, bring 
 out more and more the futihty of their pursuit, and enforce 
 
 ' I have followed doubtfully Dr. Ginsburg's interpretation of the 
 difficult words in vi. 3, ' and also that he hath no burial ' (A. V.), ' and 
 moreover he have no burial ' (R. V.). 
 
9^ Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 each in turn the lesson of man's frailty, ' In this life, in this 
 vain life,' he sadly reiterates the word, ' which man spendeth 
 like a passing shadow, who knoweth,' he ends the chapter by 
 asking, ' what is good for man ? ' Listen to his words : 
 For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the 
 days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow i' for who 
 can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun ? A 
 cloud of irrepressible, inexpressible, melancholy hangs around 
 him ; a leaden weight is on the spring of his spirit. It is a 
 sad and gloomy verse, and it strikes, in a measure, the key- 
 note of what follows. For out of this very gloom and sadness 
 come forth in the next chapter (vii) thoughts that, clothed as 
 they are once more in a proverbial form, have gone, some of 
 them, the round of the world. They still come home to the 
 experience of many of us as 'winged words ; ' far-flying shafts 
 of wisdom, even of highest truth, strangely mingled with 
 sentiments which startle and perplex, bewilder and offend. 
 
 Let me place some of them before you side by side ; 
 guarding myself against the temptation — shall I say what some 
 might call the specially clerical temptation ? — of dwelling only 
 on what seems edifying, and passing over, or explaining away 
 the force of, all that reminds us that we are not sitting at the 
 feet of an Evangelical Prophet of the Old Testament, or a 
 Divine or Apostolic teacher of the New ; but of one great 
 in himself, yet less than the least in the kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 ' Dear,' he says, ' to the human senses,' speaking, remember 
 to an Eastern world, ' is the odour of costly unguents, of sweet 
 frankincense, and fragrant spikenard. But dearer still, more 
 precious still, an honoured name, whose odour attracts the 
 love, and penetrates and fills for a while the whole heart and 
 memory of our friends.' A trite thought it may seem, but it 
 is thrown in the Hebrew into the form of a play on words, 
 not easy to reproduce; and it introduces a parallel line of 
 sterner stuff, followed by others which seem, each in turn, to 
 confront and rebuke the common instincts of humanity. A 
 
viii.] Chapter vii. i-6. 97 
 
 good 7iame is better than precious spikenard; what follows ? and 
 the day of death thafi the day of one s birth. ' Call none happy 
 till he dies,' said the Greek, with the experience and the dread 
 of sudden reverses before his eyes. Our teacher passes on and 
 gives no reason. Those who have studied his earlier words 
 will ask for none. Yet we, my friends, may have learned to 
 borrow in another sense his words ; happy, if we can have 
 learned to breathe into them a higher, a less dreary, signifi- 
 cance; if we can look on death not merely as a peaceful sleep 
 after 'life's fitful fever,' but as the gate to another life, as the re- 
 uniter of the departed. But these are thoughts of which we have 
 no trace in the page before us. The Angel of Death is there ; 
 no Angel of Resurrection sits within the sepulchre. And 
 he goes on, in words familiar to us all, to run a tilt, as 
 it were, against all the more natural and obvious feelings of 
 humanity. // is better, he says, to go to the house of mouryi- 
 ing — mourning, remember, for the dead — thart to the house of 
 feasting ; sorrow is better than laughter ; the heart of the wise 
 is in the house of mourning. Yet need I do more than repeat 
 his words, and ask whether there are not some here who feel 
 that among their best spent hours have been those in which 
 they have shared and lightened the burden of bereavement 
 and of sorrow .? To such ' the house of mourning ' has been 
 in the very truest sense better ' than the house of feasting.' 
 They know that they have received there more than they have 
 given. 
 
 And then, passing, with but a slight thread of obvious con- 
 nexion, from point to point, he bids us prize the wholesome 
 but distasteful rebuke of the wise above the most gleeful mirth 
 of the foolish, a mirth that dies away as briefly and unprofitably 
 as the short fierce crackling blaze of the dry thorns, when 
 used, not to kindle, but in place of, more substantial fuel — a 
 fire of straw, as we might say (vv. 5, 6). Next, with a passing 
 glance at the evil already dwelt on, the demoralizing effect of 
 extortion and of corruption. Surely oppression maketh a wise 
 
 H 
 
98 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart '^ (v. 7) — the 'gift' 
 remember, here and elsewhere, is the bribe that corrupts the 
 judge and distorts justice — he drops a hint as to the place in 
 life of calm patience, of waiting to see the end of things. How 
 often in our own experience is, in his words, the end of a thing 
 better than the beginning thereof; and he adds a v/arning, in 
 verse 9, against indulging in bitter feelings : Be not hasty in 
 thy spirit to be atigry : for anger resteth in the bosom of fools. 
 How truly had he looked into the petty and needless resent- 
 ments and estrangements that fill up and disfigure the life of 
 those whom he at once stamps as ' fools.' He passes on to 
 add golden words, needed, doubtless, in the days of Homer 
 and Hesiod, needed, we may well believe, in his own. ' Do 
 not rail,' he says, ' at your own times, be they dark or bright ; 
 waste not your hours in asking why this degeneracy, this 
 decline, from the good old time.' Say not thou. What is the 
 cause that the former days were better than these ? for thou dost 
 not enquire wisely concerning this. He does not add, 'instead 
 of querulous lamentation over what is irretrievably gone, be 
 up and doing, and mend what is amiss in your own day,' Such 
 hopeful lessons he cannot give us. But he does rise out of 
 the gloomy mood in which even wisdom had seemed wholly 
 worthless. He tells us, in verse 11, that wisdom is good, not 
 ' with^ as our version gives it, but on an equal footing"^ ivith, an 
 inheritance; that it is a precious legacy from father to son ; 
 he knows that ' knowledge is power ' to all that see the sun- 
 light. 'Nay, more than this,' he adds, 'wealth may protect 
 men from many evils,' for ivisdom is a deferice, and money 
 is a defence : but ' knowledge is something better. It can 
 quicken a life within ; it can give salt and savour to that 
 which wealth may only deaden, and make insipid ; ' But the 
 excellence of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that 
 have it. 
 
 * ' The understanding ' (R.V.). 
 
 ' ' Wisdom is as good as an inheritance ; yea, more excellent is it to 
 them that see the sun ' (R. V.). 
 
VIII.] Chapter vii. 8-16. 99 
 
 Wc seem for a time to have left, with our teacher, the 
 valley of perpetual gloom, and to be walking in genial 
 converse along life's more cheerful highway. But soon the 
 problems of existence reassert themselves ; his tone grows 
 sterner ; he tries to wring some teaching from the sorrows, 
 even from the anomalies of life. 'Remember,' he says, 'that 
 man cannot mend, cannot foresee his fate.' Consider, he 
 says in verse 13, the work of God, Who can malie tJiat 
 straight that He hath made croolied? ' Enjoy prosperity 
 when it comes. In trouble, consider, bethink thee, be calm. 
 God has made both weal and woe : man must drink life's 
 mingled chalice, taste each in turn ; to know the future is for- 
 bidden him.' In the day of prosperity be joyful, hut 171 the day 
 of adversity consider ; God also hath set the one over against 
 the other, to the end that man should find out Jiothittg after him 
 (verse 14). 'Do not be startled,' he goes on to say, ' by the most 
 terrible paradoxes. I, in my days of vanity, in my pilgrimage 
 through life's illusions, have seen the most baffling of all 
 sights;' and he describes, in verse 15, the spectacle which 
 brought such agony to the Psalmist, and wrung such words 
 of despair from the heart of Job. There is a Just man — a 
 righteous and good man, that perisheth in his righteous- 
 ness, in spite of his righteousness; and there is a ivicked 
 man that prolongeth his life in, in spite of, his wickedness. 
 It is, he says, a world in which, though it is ruled by God, 
 yet evil is often successful, good often ends in defeat. 
 And what then ? ' Cleave in spite of this,' does he say, ' to 
 goodness.?' 'Care for thyself? Strive for the sake of 
 others to enlarge the chances of success for goodness } ' 
 Or, ' face all in the faith that the law of right is supreme, 
 after all, over all other rules of life ; that somehow, thou 
 knowest not how, and somewhere, thou knowest not where, 
 God will prove the good man's friend ? ' Ah, no ! not 
 yet, at least. Be not, he says, in verse 16, righteous over 
 much. Do not endanger thyself by useless enthusiasm in 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 the pursuit of what is, or seems, right. Why shouldest thou 
 destroy thyself? 
 
 The Jews seek to slay thee, was said by Jewish friends to 
 Him who came to give His life for His friends. It was yet to 
 be impressed on the world, by One who could reach hearts 
 that even a Socrates could not touch, that ' to destroy oneself, 
 as our Preacher calls it, to give one's life for the cause of 
 truth, to die in the cause of God and of poor humanity, was 
 not to lose one's life, but to save it. Be not righteous over 
 much ! why shouldest thou destroy thyself? We have heard it 
 said, ' he that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth 
 his life for My sake shall find it\' 
 
 We have touched, it would seem, the very lowest ground of 
 our Preacher's teaching, I will not attempt to place before 
 you the various attempts which have been made to thrust aside 
 the meaning of his words. Turn to too many commentators, 
 and you will find them in abundance. Dare we say that it is 
 merely a touch of satire on some nascent Pharisaism, such as he 
 has glanced at when he bade men use few words rather than 
 many in their approach to God^ ? Or does he not rather mean 
 just what he says, and are the words a deliberate warning 
 against over zeal, over rigour, over enthusiasm, such as might 
 possibly have been heard in English pulpits some two or three 
 generations back ? Be not, he says, righteous over much. But 
 then he turns sharply round and adds, ' Do not therefore rush 
 headlong into wickedness and folly. Its paths are the paths 
 of death. Lay thine hand, it is good to do so,' he adds, ' on 
 the one precept : but do not lose sight of the other. It is he 
 that feareth God that will steer his way between both.' // is 
 good that thou shouldest take hold of this : yea, also from that 
 withdraw not thine hand : for he that feareth God shall come 
 forth of them all (verse i8). In his coldest, grayest, hour, this 
 sense of the fear of God still smoulders, as it were, within his 
 soul : not indeed the quickening love of God, but something 
 ^ St. Matt. X. 39. 2 Chap. v. 2. 
 
VIII.] Chapter vii. 16-24. 101 
 
 that inspires reverence ; something that saves him from utter 
 shipwreck amidst the crossing and eddying currents of this 
 sunless sea of hopeless pessimism. And then— unconscious 
 it would seem, utterly unconscious, of the effect that his 
 words would have one day on souls trained by a higher 
 teaching — he turns again to the value of wisdom, to its 
 strength and power, and at the same time to the limits of 
 human goodness. There is not a righteous man upon earth, 
 he tells us in verse 20, one that doelh good and sinneth not. 
 He adds an aphorism, bidding us not pry too deeply into 
 men's judgment on us, not ask too anxiously what they say 
 of us. We may hear, he says, censure where we least expect 
 it, even as we have often censured others. Take no heed unto 
 all words that are spoken. It is the very teaching of good 
 sense, and the gathered experience of common life ; needed 
 perhaps, not less but more, in days when to be ready at short 
 notice with measured criticism, and to pronounce daily praise 
 or daily censure, have grown into a profession. Its extremest 
 form I read last summer, carved in ancient spelling, over the 
 doorway of a Scottish college ^. They have said; — what say 
 they .^ let them say. 'Be indifferent to idle praise, or idle 
 blame : to the babble of mankind about thy path in life.' 
 
 And having said thus much, the speaker pauses. The old 
 withering, blighting, sense of his powerlessness to grasp real 
 wisdom begins to ache again. All these things, he says, in 
 verse 23, have I proved, tried, by wisdom. 'Here is the result 
 of all my thoughts. Take it for its worth. But wisdom, 
 wisdom worthy of the name, wisdom that should lift me in 
 the scale of being, I have never reached.' / said, I will be 
 wise, but it was too hard /or me. That ivhich ivas far is still 
 far, that which was deep, is still deep, zvho can find it out ? He 
 has done his best to read the secret of life, and it is still a 
 riddle. 
 
 And now, in his gloomy Eastern mood, he turns to the 
 
 ^ Marischal College, at Aberdeen, 
 
102 Lectures 07i Ecclcsiastes. [viii. 
 
 darker side, the only one he here recognises, of the relation 
 of the sexes ; finds in her, in whom so many souls have recog- 
 nised a source of light and help, the secret of life's woes. 
 
 No ' ministering angel she ' in his view. ' I have sought,' 
 he says, ' pondered and studied ;' and I find more bitter than 
 death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her 
 hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; 
 but the simier shall be taken by her (verse 26). We see at 
 once, as we read his cynical and contemptuous words, that 
 we are in another world than that of the Son of Mary, Who 
 spoke of man and wife as becoming one ; Who showed 
 Himself first when He rose from the dead to a woman's eyes ; 
 Whose religion has carried with it, has upheld and still upholds, 
 the charter of protection and honour to the wife, the mother, 
 the daughter, and the sister. Sad and weary are the words 
 that follow. / have sought (vv. 27, 28), / have looked, count- 
 ing one by one ; my soul yet seeketh and seeketh in vain, for a true 
 vian : yet one such in a thousand I have found ; but a true 
 womati, one worthy of the name, I havefoutid never atid no- 
 where ! It is another sign of our having passed from the circle 
 of Isaac and Rebekah, of the loving Ruth, of the Shunammite 
 widow, even of the bright picture of the virtuous woman which 
 closes the Book of Proverbs, whose children rise up atid call 
 her blessed, whose husband also praises ^ her, and that we are 
 moving in a darker world, amidst more sombre and sadder 
 experiences. ' Yet, after all,' he says, as with a sigh, ' In the 
 beginning it was not so. God made man for higher things.' 
 The story of Eden and of the fall seems to be present to his 
 mind. If so, it is the one direct link with the sacred records 
 of his race that the book offers. Lo I this ofily have I foimd 
 that God made man upright ; 'In the image of God created 
 He him,' but they (men) have sought out many inve7itions ; — 
 man's restless heart t)as plunged him into evil. 
 
 Of any upward progress of mankind, of any of the real or 
 ^ Proverbs xxxi. 28. 
 
VIII.] Chapters vii, 26-39, viii. i. 103 
 
 less real results of the slow education of our race, there is 
 not a word. His view of the history of the human family is 
 not one that leads him for a moment, as it has led men — 
 very earnest and very serious men — in our own day, to try to 
 find a substitute for a faith on which they have lost their hold 
 in idealising what is best and highest in their fellow-men. 
 There is no prospect of our writer being tempted to spell, as 
 we should say, the word Humanity with a capital letter. 
 
 Do you find this strange medley of ' reflections upon life ' 
 wearying and perplexing ? He strikes, in the opening words 
 of the next chapter (viii), another note. The wisdom which he 
 had lately found so hollow, he once more eulogises in half 
 mysterious words, whose sense seems almost veiled as in the 
 ambiguity of an oracle. Who is as, none i. e. is like unto, the 
 wise 7}ian i^ None but the wise can know the interpretation 
 of things. Wisdom, i.e. a practical wisdom, lights up the /ace, 
 and teaches nmi (the meaning of the words is obscure) to 
 command their very countenances and expression (verse i). 
 
 And with these words he gives a series of precepts, 
 shrouded, as I have said, in hints and faintly-traced suggestions, 
 as to what 1 a high and ennobling rule of life ? No ! but 
 the necessity and duty of submission to despotic power. It 
 is very different from the language of St. Paul, bidding the 
 early Christians submit themselves to the powers that be''-, as 
 ordained of God. There is not a trace of the enthusiastic 
 loyalty of a Hebrew to a native sovereign ivhose power 
 loveth rightcous7iess, who judges Gods people with righteous- 
 ness. His poor with judgment ; in whose days the righteous 
 flourish, atid abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth ^. 
 Nor do we find the freeman's boldness, with which an Elijah 
 could confront an apostate or a tyrant king. That fire is 
 spent ! The counsels here, as where he recurs to the same 
 subject in the last five verses of chapter x, are those of 
 submission, forbearance, self-control, prudence, in dealing 
 
 1 Romans xiii. i, ^ Psalm Ixxiii. 7 
 
104 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 with a power irresistible, overbearing, often oppressive, yet 
 which carries within itself the seeds of decay. Such advice 
 may well have been needed by a generation of Jews, proud, 
 intractable, detesting foreign rule, and groaning under the 
 tyranny of an alien monarch. It is scarcely such as a 
 Solomon would have proffered to his fellow Hebrews, bone 
 of his bone, flesh of his flesh. 'Keep, he says, the kings 
 commandment ; remember the oath of allegiance, imposed upon 
 or taken freely by you. Go not in haste from his presence ; 
 do not rise up, sta7id erect, to protest at any evil word or act. 
 Remember that his power is unlimited ; He doeth whatsoever 
 pleaseth him. Where the word of a king is, there is power, 
 and who may say unto him, What doest thou ?' (vv. 2-4). We 
 are reading, as we see at once, counsels of Eastern submission 
 to an Eastern despot. Two centuries ago they were some- 
 times quoted from English pulpits, to convince Englishmen 
 that the king's will was by right and by God's Word above 
 law, and that Charters, and Statutes, and Acts of Parliament, 
 and all the ancient or hard-won liberties of our island race 
 were worthless things^. 'Obey,' he goes on inverse 5 to say, 
 ' and obedience will ward off" evil ; ' and then, in what seem 
 ambiguous and stammering accents, he hints that redress 
 will come. Time and judgment, he says twice over, come, 
 as the wise man knows, to all thitigs ; wait awhile, and 
 oppression will work its own remedy. I can hardly ask you to 
 follow me through the obscurity of the text, often quite 
 unintelligible in our own and other versions. He seems to 
 say that the misery caused by a tyrant presses heavily on 
 himself, is a weight that will bring him down at last ; that his 
 eyes are blinded to the future — none can read it to him ; that 
 all his power will not aid him to retain his spirit, or keep his 
 doom at bay ; that Death admits no exemption when he calls 
 
 ' One of the most interesting of such sermons is that preached by 
 Dr. Sybthorpe, at Northampton, in the year 1626, entitled ' Apostolike 
 Obedience.' 
 
VIII.] CJiaptcr viii. 3-13. 105 
 
 in his conscripts, and that no evil arts will save the wicked 
 (vv. 5-9). The language seems studiedly dark, yet to be 
 a suggestion of the teaching of one side of human history, the 
 fall, the merited fall, of unrighteous tyrants. There is, after 
 all, a God above us, he seems to whisper, and he throws into 
 the hint a whole treasure of consolation. 
 
 But, yet again, as he would fain pour balm into the open 
 wounds of an oppressed race, his own wounds bleed afresh. 
 The sense of a misruled world is never long banished from 
 his thoughts. Through the darkness of the words that follow 
 we discern an image, shrouded and half seen, of the successful 
 oppressor, prosperous in life, honoured in burial, and of man- 
 kind sick and fevered and demoralized by the sight. Because 
 sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore 
 the heart of the softs of men is fully set in them to do evil (verse 
 11). We think of military despotisms, corrupt rulers, of 
 freedom crushed and conscience coerced; or again of the 
 crimes of Nihilism, the excesses of a Jacquerie, of September 
 massacres, of sudden assassinations, of strange conspiracies 
 burrowing beneath the thrones of prosperous empires. 
 
 But the mind of this watcher of human life sways backwards 
 and forwards with life's shifting scene. ' The contradictions of 
 hfe,' it has been well said, ' reflect themselves in his musings \' 
 ' Man hurries ; God is patient.' He comforts himself with 
 the ineradicable sense that God must be on the side, not of 
 might, but of right. Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, 
 and his days he prolotiged, yet surely I know that it shall be 
 well with them that fear God, which fear before Hijn : hut it 
 shall not be ivell with the zvicked, neither shall he prolong his 
 days, which are as a shadow ; because he feareth not before 
 God (vv. 12, 13). 
 
 Yet scarcely have the words crossed his lips when the 
 bitter sense of a sadder reading of history mocks his hope 
 and derides his faith — ■'■ This also is vanity.' There be just 
 ^ Dean Plumptre. 
 
io6 Lect?ircs ofi Ecclesiastes. [viii. 
 
 vien, unto whom it happe^ieth according to the work of the 
 7vicked ; again, there be zvicked meft, to whom it happeneth 
 according to the work of the righteous : I said that this also 
 IS vanity (verse 14). The riddle has recurred again, and he 
 cannot solve it. Once more — it is for the fifth time — he 
 turns back to the only ground that seems quite sure. ' Man 
 has no better course open than just to take the enjoyments 
 of the present, to eat, and drink, and rejoice in the fruit of his 
 labour.' Then I commended rnirth, because a ?)ia7i hath no 
 better thing under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry ; 
 for that shall abide xvith him of his labour all the days of his 
 life, which God giveth him under the sun. It is the last verse 
 that I shall read to-day. So the baffled thinker comes down 
 again to earth from his flight into higher thought. ^ 
 
 When I say ' higher ' you will understand what I mean. 
 I am not thinking of those prudential maxims, however wise, 
 framed though they be to stand the test of centuries, of the 
 wear and tear of time, and of a transference to other races 
 and other centres of reflection and experience. 
 
 Among these he moves often with a singular felicity of 
 thought and expression; at times, no doubt, as I need hardly 
 remind you, with an obscurity of utterance, possibly half 
 intentional, even if largely owing to the nature of the language 
 in which he necessarily clothes his thoughts. But for a 
 moment he has pierced through the ring which has confined 
 him to the interests of common life, and risen also above his 
 own dark misgivings ; and there has flashed across his soul for 
 a moment the certainty that there is a power in the world 
 that ' makes for righteousness,' a divine and supreme law behind 
 all the puzzles and anomalies of life, which will solve them all. 
 He lays his hand on this, but he cannot grasp it ; and, 
 finding no sure and solid ground in those loftier regions, he 
 bids his readers, the men of his own uncertain day — a day, 
 doubtless of trouble, and rebuke, and blasphemy — to plant 
 their feet on the one green patch of earth left them in the 
 
VIII.] Chapter vlii. 14, 15. 107 
 
 waste ; to seize the one thing which shall abide with them 
 of all their labour. Let them enjoy what God has given 
 them, the fruit of their toil. 
 
 It must have been, my friends — let us say it once more — a 
 dreary time that was fit for no higher teaching. Such a 
 standing ground could be but a temporary aid, a rock of 
 passing shelter from a stormy hour. To something better he 
 may yet be guided. But seven times over, before he ends, he 
 will have bidden men take refuge in it. Did he say it ' seventy 
 times seven/ we should feel that he has not spoken to us his 
 final message, that he has yet something better to say, could 
 he frame his lips to utter it. We may find such counsel in 
 Greek or Roman lyric, or in Persian poet ; but we know that 
 it will never satisfy the human soul ; and our teacher has felt 
 that touch of God's enlightening spirit, he has had that 
 partial vision of higher things and of a higher law, which 
 will never let him rest in a call to mere repose, to mere 
 enjoyment. We need not grudge him this illusory gleam. 
 It will soon pass, and a cloud, more ennobling than the 
 passing sunshine of ' this fair soft present,' will gather round 
 him; and through that cloud will come some light to lead 
 him onwards. But the cloud will still be there, and the 
 pilgrim will yet press on with aching feet, for he knows 
 that it is better to do so than to rest content with the 
 unsatisfying teaching which from time to time he utters. 
 We shall follow him next week through another group of 
 strange and mingled phantoms that will not let him rest. 
 But we shall feel that, after all, his trouble is a higher thing 
 than his tranquillity ; that, in his own words, ' it is better to 
 go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting.' 
 
 [January 3, 1885.] 
 
LECTURE IX. 
 
 Chapter VIII. i6, to end of Chapter X. 
 
 Those who have at all followed the course of these Lec- 
 tures will have recognised that no attempt has been made to 
 put before them the book with which they are concerned in 
 the form of a systematic or methodical treatise, or address, 
 on any one single clearly marked and definite subject. 
 
 Great pains have been taken from the very first to let the 
 author speak for himself. No attempt has been made to force 
 upon him any fixed purpose at all, other than that of ' think- 
 ing aloud' — the phrase has been borrowed more than once 
 alread}^ — of thinking aloud the manifold, the sometimes con- 
 flicting, views, precepts, and feelings, that he was moved and 
 guided to utter. These we have looked on as coming to us 
 from an age which I do not attempt to fix — for we have no 
 adequate data for doing so — but which was obviously one, 
 in which the firm faith in a present and righteous God, leading 
 on the people of Israel towards a promised goal, and rebuking 
 and chastising them whenever they turned aside, was, if not 
 dead, yet benumbed or sleeping. Viewed in this light the 
 book still presents many difficulties, but its general tone and 
 substance become fairly plain, and, if I may venture to say 
 so, exceedingly interesting and exceedingly instructive. 
 
 For myself, the very contrast between what I read here 
 and the language of so much besides in my Bible and my 
 Prayer-book gives a fresh and welcome value to much in 
 these last, that had grown, or was in danger of growing, 
 familiar and commonplace. The simplest Collect, in which 
 
Chapter viii. 16. 109 
 
 the Christian utters one prayer to God, seems to me — I 
 know not whether it is so to any here — to gain a new force 
 and beauty, as I read or hear it, after following the lead 
 of one who taught the only wisdom that the Church could 
 reach under that hour of darkness. The very least in the 
 kingdom of heaven is greater than he. Yet the least in the 
 kingdom of Heaven may learn much from the strivings and 
 heart-searchings of a soul, that felt the enduring problems of 
 this baffling scene, and was stirred and moved to place on 
 record, and was permitted to win room in the Sacred Canon 
 for, a picture of a stage in the education of his race of the 
 profoundest and most impressive interest. 
 
 Let us go on to-day to follow towards its close this strange 
 outpoiu^ing of the sad experience of one who seems to sit 
 alone and watch his fellow-men drifting this way and that 
 on the aimless waves of life, and to utter from time to time 
 some words of guidance to a passing shelter. 
 
 He begins again, in the last two verses, the i6th and 
 17th, of chapter viii, to tell us of his own efforts to find 
 a solution to the enigmas of which the air is full. He has 
 applied his heart to knoiv wisdom and to watch the ceaseless 
 toil of life. When I applied mine heart, he says in the i6th 
 verse, to kjiow wisdom, and to see the business that is done 
 upon the earth. He has looked out once more on toiling 
 humanity, toiling then as now — the sunrise bringing back 
 opera atque labores, eveft now, as in the days of Virgil, or 
 when the Psalmist wrote The sun ariseth, and man goeth 
 forth to his work and to his labour till the evening^. JNIany of 
 us here know well the meaning of the words. There is, he 
 adds, whether thinking of the meditative student, or the night- 
 watching soldier, or the anxious care-harassed statesman, 
 we cannot say, y&r also there is that neither day nor night 
 seeth sleep with his eyes. All this strange scene I have watched 
 and studied, and what is the result ? 
 ' Psalm civ. 23. 
 
no Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ix. 
 
 All the labour of man is for his mouth, he has ah'eady said. 
 The answer then is simple. Man toils to sustain life. The bee 
 works, the swallow spends long days on the wing, the wolf 
 ravins, with one and the same object. All life, we are some- 
 times told, may be resolved into two or three primary instincts. 
 But look at it, he says in the next verse, in another Hght, 
 as the luork of God beneath the su7i, as ordered by a Being 
 whom we are to worship and to reverence, and who has put 
 other cravings into the human heart, than this desire to fill 
 his mouth with good things, and all takes another and a 
 darker hue. That simple answer fails to satisfy. Then I 
 beheld all the ivork of God, that a man cajitiotfind out the zvort: 
 that is done under the sun : because though a man labour 
 to seek it out, yet he shall not find it. The whole spectacle 
 becomes confused and dark, yea more, unknowable ; yea, 
 farther ; though a zvise man think to know it, yet shall he not 
 be able to find it (v. 17). What then ? does he put aside this, 
 the 'unknown and the unknowable,' and find refuge in what 
 he has already five times told us is our only solace, quiet and 
 restful enjoyment of the moment ? There is that in him 
 which will not let him find comfort here. We turn to the i st 
 verse of the ninth chapter, and we find that the inexorable 
 voice within, that prompted him to speak first of all, will not 
 let him rest in this ; it is better, it tells him, to beat against 
 the bars of his prison-house than merely to smile and feast 
 for the passing hour. How can I, he seems to say, as I 
 look at what the spectacle of human life daily reveals, at 
 the tragedy that meets my eyes .? , For all this have I con- 
 sidered, proved, and tried — his words in the original^ are of 
 exceeding strength. What .'' that the righteous and the zvise 
 and their works, all they do in this toilsome world, are in the 
 hand of God. It seems at first sight a welcome and calming 
 and consoling thought. We think of the Psalmist's words, 
 My times are in Thy hands, or of the words of Jesus, Vour 
 * ' All this I laid to my heart, even to explore all this ' (R. V.). 
 
IX.] Chapters vHi. 17, ix, 1-3. 111 
 
 Father knoiveth that ye have need of these things. Ah, no ! il 
 is another, and a desolating and withering lesson that comes 
 home to him from what he sees. No man knozueth either the 
 love or the hatred that lie, both alike, before them, veiled in the 
 future ; the river of life along which his course lies is wrapped 
 in mist. Man's destiny is wholly dark, and is out of his own 
 control. But it is not man's ignorance that cuts him to the 
 heart, it is, that the injustice of earthly tribunals seems to 
 have its counterpart in a higher region. No goodness, no 
 righteousness will avail against the persistent injustice of the 
 laws by which the world seems ruled. See what a half blas- 
 phemous indictment, what passionate recalcitration, against 
 the God whose fear is in his mouth, is embodied in the 
 cold and calm despair of the words that follow in the next 
 verse. It is a terrible reading of the 'Analogy of Nature.' 
 All tlmigs co77ie alike to all : there is one event to the righteous, 
 and to the ivicked ; to the good afid to the clean, and to the 
 unclean; to him that sacrificeth, atid to him that sacrificeth not : 
 as is the good, so is the siiiner ; and he that sioeareth, sweareth 
 rashly, as he that feareth an oath (verse 2). There is 
 no mark at all, he says, of a moral government in this 
 world. The Providence of God is as indiscriminating as 
 the falling tree, or the hungry tiger, or the desolating famine. 
 If 'the fittest survive' for a time, that fitness has nothing 
 in common with goodness or righteousness. Truly our 
 thinker ' thinks aloud.' Whatever dark thoughts stir within 
 his soul, they come forth freely, and he gives them soon, if 
 possible, a still more poignant and distressful tone. The 
 greatest of all evils beneath the sun, he says in the 3rd verse, 
 is this. Life is full of evil : fever and madness are in men's 
 veins, are in their heart, he says while they live ; and then 
 comes death ; yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of 
 evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, arid after 
 that they go to the dead. And death is not merely the nothing- 
 ness that man shares with the beast, the wise with the fool, or 
 
iiz Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ix. 
 
 a mere escape from the sorrows of life. But death itself, 
 coming, as it does, in mocking impartiality to the good and 
 the evil, is an insult and a wrong. Is it possible for human 
 misery and despair to speak in sharper accents ? This is an 
 evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is 
 one event unto all (v. 4). 
 
 But his moan grows deeper. Even the gift of life is some- 
 thing. It has at least the sense of being, and the capacity 
 for hope ; /or to him that is joined to all the livifig there is 
 hope. Even at worst, it has the consciousness of something, 
 though that something be death itself, yet to come. A 
 live dog, he says in bitterness — and remember with what 
 contempt and scorn the Jewish and kindred races looked on 
 what we and our forefathers have for ages treated as the 
 intelligent and faithful companion and friend of man — a dog 
 in life is better than the kingly lion ifi death (v. 4). 
 
 And then, in even sadder strain than he has yet used, he 
 speaks of the appalling finality of the doom of death ; the 
 entire and hopeless end ; the blotting out of this life's story ; 
 the entire absence of even the memory of men's names. And 
 his words come to us with an added pathos, if they were 
 written in those dark and later centuries in which the inner 
 history of the Jewish nation has disappeared from human 
 memory, almost as a train of travellers is lost to sight in a 
 tunnel under some solid mountain ; or like a river hidden 
 for a while and running its sunless course beneath the sur- 
 face of the earth, which elsewhere it fertilized and gladdened. 
 For the living,he S3iys,know that they shall die: but the dead know 
 not any thing, neither have they any more a ravard ; for the 
 memory of theynis forgotteyi. Also their love, a7id their hatred 
 and their envy, is now perished ; neither have they any more a 
 portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun (vv. 
 5, 6). The book of life is open for a while, but death shuts 
 
 it for ever. 
 
 'Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence.' 
 
IX.] Chapter ha. ^-\o. 113 
 
 And then suddenly, and in a moment, his half fierce, half 
 solemn mood seems to change ; and, widi an abruptness abso- 
 lutely starding, he returns, for the sixth time, to the precept, not 
 of meeting and sounding the problem, but of turning from 
 it, and, if the skies are dark above, lighting the festal lamp 
 within. 
 
 The advice is more detailed and more emphatic than it 
 has been before. The pendulum swings back with fresh force 
 to its full length. There might seem almost a touch of irony 
 in his language. 
 
 Go thy way, we read in the 7th verse, eat thy bread ivilh joy, 
 and drink thy wine with a 7nerry heart ; for God now accepteth 
 thy works. This, at least. He approveth, this thankful enjoy- 
 ment. Again, Let thy garments be always ivhite ; and let thy 
 head lack no ointment. Wear at all times the festal garment ; 
 let no ' oil of gladness,' no scent and perfume, be lacking to 
 thy head. Again, Live joyfully with her 7vhom thou lovest all 
 the days of this short and frail life given thee : all the days of 
 the life of thy vanity, ivhich he hath given thee under the sun, 
 all the days of thy vanity : for that is thy portion in this life, and 
 in thy labour which thou takest under the sun (v. 9). ' All the 
 days of the life of thy vanity.' Short and frail the life ! The 
 skeleton is handed round even at the marriage feast. Yes, short 
 and frail; and in the near distance is Death. Take enjoyment, 
 he tries to say, and welcome the activity which gives life 
 interest. And he goes on, in verse 10, Whatsoever thy hand 
 jindeth to do, do it with thy might. It is not, we must feel, 
 the wise counsel to forget, in vigorous and useful activity, those 
 questions in life which are insoluble, but it is merely secondary 
 to the main thought, that the end is near, the end of all things. 
 For there is no work, he adds, nor device, nor wisdom, in 
 the grave ivhithcr thou goest. 
 
 Need I once more say that we have no gospel here .'' 
 There may be — it is possible — there may be those among 
 the fortunate, the healthy, the well-to-do, among those who 
 
 I 
 
114 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ix. 
 
 feel no need of a gospel at all, who can tell us, as some have 
 told us, that they are not aware that the entire disappearance 
 of religion would very greatly affect the world in which they 
 live. Such men may listen to such language with equanimity. 
 And there may have been a condition of thought, of life, and of 
 society, in which it may have formed an element in the best 
 counsel that could be given. But we feel at once; let me say 
 it once more, that such a time must have been an evil time, a 
 time in which the moral and spiritual nerve of mankind must 
 have been almost paralysed; and we can hardly wonder that 
 Christian Father and Jewish Paraphraser vied with each 
 other in translating the words — plain and clear as they are — 
 into a wholly different language, and forced them to render 
 up quite opposite teaching. 
 
 If St. Jerome interpreted the bread and wine, of which the 
 Preacher speaks, as the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the 
 Chaldee Paraphraser does not fall behind. It will interest 
 you to listen for a moment to his version^: ' Go,' the Lord of 
 the world will one day say to the righteous, ' go, eat with joy 
 the bread which has been laid up for thee, (in return) for 
 the bread which thou hast given to the poor and needy which 
 were a hungered. Drink with a good heart the wine which 
 has been preserved for thee in Paradise, (in return) for the 
 wine which thou hast mingled to the poor and needy which 
 were thirsty. For, behold, thy good work has long been 
 acceptable before the Lord.' Need I add after this, that, with 
 Jew and Christian alike, the ' white garments ' express, not 
 festivity at all, but freedom from sin ; that the festal ointment 
 means anything else than its literal sense ; that ' whatsoever 
 thy hand findeth to do ' is closely limited to works of charity 
 and goodness ? 
 
 It is so throughout; and lessons, sometimes noble and 
 edifying, sometimes trivial and foolish, are wrung from all 
 that is stern and grim, paradoxical or bafBing. 
 
 ^ It is given in full in Dr. Ginsburg's edition. 
 
IX.] Chapter ix. lo, ii. 115 
 
 Let us resolutely put aside these voices that call upon us 
 on the left hand and the right, and pursue a steady path 
 through the actual words, and actual thoughts and feelings, of 
 the book which we are studying. Scarcely has our Preacher, 
 for the sixth time, and in the most impressive manner, bidden 
 his readers turn from the confusing problems of the present 
 and the certain darkness of the future, to find rest in joyful 
 contentment with the present, than the unappeaseable pain 
 awakes within, and he turns once more to the stage and 
 theatre of human life. He has spoken in tragic accents of 
 the powerlessness of virtue, or religion, or fidelity, to mend or 
 prolong the life of man. He has spoken before of the 
 common end which awaits the extremes of human folly and 
 human wisdom. ' Be it so,' he has said, ' let us not reason on 
 the future, but enjoy the present.' 
 
 But he has not yet found an opiate for his pain. The 
 course of life is full of wrongs, like that greatest of all wrongs, 
 the doom of death. It is not only in the grave that wisdom 
 profits nothing. Even in this life it avails but little. 
 
 Contemptible as folly is, yet it is often stronger than wisdom. 
 The wise man must make up his mind to failure, to ingrati- 
 tude, to submission to those who are in truth his inferiors, to 
 evil rulers and their worthless favourites. The world is ruled 
 by no certain law : at any rate, it is none to which wisdom 
 has the key. 
 
 / returned, he says in the nth verse, and saw under the 
 sun, as I started afresh on my range over the scene of life, 
 that the race is not to the swift — is he borrowing his imagery 
 from the storehouse of Greek life on which St. Paul drew so 
 freely ? — nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the 
 wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour 
 to men of skill ; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 
 
 All things, he had said before, have their fixed time, and 
 that time, like that which we call ' chance,' is something which 
 human wisdom cannot alter, nay, which it cannot even 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ix. 
 
 foresee. The law that rules it is beyond our ken. For man 
 also knoweih not his time : as the fishes that are taken in an 
 evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare ; so are 
 the sons of men snared in an evil time, when itfalleth suddenly 
 upon thein (verse 12). You can neither force the hand of your 
 fate, nor read your fortune. 
 
 He could hardly have expressed in more hopeless lan- 
 guage the utter weakness of man in the presence of the 
 overpowering forces which surround him. Habakkuk had 
 used the same image of the uncared-for fishes ' that have no 
 ruler ' in one of the most moving and plaintive passages in 
 sacred literature ^. But Habakkuk rises further on, mounts, he 
 says, ' on hinds' feet,' to heights of faith and joy and one- 
 ness with God such as our pilgrim never reaches. To him 
 who speaks to us, life is, thus far, something in which neither 
 goodness nor prudence avails anything. 
 
 How different from the cautious yet less cheerless estimate 
 of the great divine of the last century, who, with the pro- 
 foundest sense of the melancholy side of human Hfe and of 
 the ignorance of man, does see 'even in the infinite dis- 
 orders, the greatest confusion of human affairs,' ' the begin- 
 nings of a righteous administration even in nature ; ' does 
 say that 'we have a declaration from Him, Who is supreme in 
 nature, that He is on the side of goodness ^' How different 
 again from the optimistic voice of his own latest, and, in 
 his own way, sympathetic French critic, M. Renan, who 
 tells young men ' Life is not vanity ; I have found it good 
 and noble, worthy of the zest you feel for it ' — has even 
 compared the course of life to a pleasant walk taken for 
 enjoyment. No, says our student of wisdom, wisdom at 
 times seems omnipotent. It is no doubt a power, but it is 
 overborne and overruled in these evil days. It may save a 
 city, it does not follow that it will aid its possessor. It 
 
 ^ Habakkuk i. 14, and iii. 17-19. 
 ^ Butler's Analogy, Part I, Chap. iii. 
 
IX.] Chapter ix. 12-18. ii7f 
 
 cannot count on gratitude or fame. ' It saveth others, itself 
 it cannot save.' And then follows a singular and suggestive 
 apologue, or tale, by the aid of which men have eagerly, if 
 vainly, striven to fix the date of him who tells it. There is 
 the little beleaguered town, with its handful of defenders, 
 and the great king outside with his huge army, piling up 
 their mounds so as to overtop its walls. There was a little 
 city, and few men within it ; and there came a great king against 
 it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks agaitist it. Now 
 there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom 
 delivered the city ; yet no man remembered that same poor man. 
 Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength : nevertheless the 
 poor man s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard 
 (vv. 14-16). 
 
 It is only in the day of crisis that wisdom wins respect 
 , from power and riches. Or, if it is true that words of 
 wisdom are listened to in the calm in which they are uttered 
 more readily than the loud blustering of a leader among 
 fools — if it is true that wisdom i^ better than weapons of 
 war, and that a thinking brain is a power greater than that 
 of cannon, or batteries, or ironclads, even in war, yet one 
 sinner, one blunderer, he seems to mean, may undo the 
 fruits of much wisdom. The words of zvise men are heard in 
 quiet more than the cry of him that rideth among fools. 
 Wisdom is better thaji iveapons of ivar : but one sinner destroy eth 
 much good {vv. 17, 18). 
 
 The writer is now launched in a course of reflections con- 
 veyed once again in a proverbial form, at times obscure, at 
 times clear as crystal. He deals in oriental manner with 
 various phases of oriental life, in words interesting, not least 
 of all, as throwing some faint light on the state of society in 
 which they were uttered. We welcome — do we not ? — a short 
 relief from the tension and strain of his bitter musings. 
 
 The first three verses of the tenth chapter merely em- 
 phasise the difference between wisdom and folly — a favourite 
 
ii8 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [ix. 
 
 text — to which, in spite of his mournful sense of the unpro- 
 fitableness of any attainable amount of wisdom, our thinker 
 clings with instinctive tenacity. 
 
 ' As dead flies, putrefying in the sweet perfume, turn a 
 delicious odour to a fetid stench, so may a little folly spread 
 its paralysing leaven over high and honoured gifts.' Dead 
 flies cause the ointment of the apothecary (the perfumer, i.e. a 
 great trade in an Eastern city), to send forth a stiiiking savour : 
 so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for ivisdom and 
 ho7iour. Of how many sad stories, of how many biographies, 
 written and unwritten, might the adage be the motto ! 
 
 ' the little rift within the lute 
 That by and by will make the music mute.' 
 
 Then follow two couplets, so to speak, cast in the form of 
 almost Arab sayings, of the contrast between the wise man 
 and the fool. The one with his heart, i. e. his mind, ready, 
 at his right side, as he walks along the track that images 
 the way of human life, ready to sustain and guide him ; the 
 other, the fool, with his" wits at the left side, not available 
 when needed to lean upon. And the fool is pictured as wan- 
 dering helplessly along the familiar highway, and proclaiming 
 to all his folly. A wise mans heart is at his right hand ; but 
 a fools heart at his left. Yea also, when he that is a fool 
 walketh by the way, his wisdofnfaileth him, and he saith to evefy 
 one that he is a fool (vv. 2, 3). But this wisdom, at times so 
 decried, at times so prized, is now to be used as a necessary 
 guide in dealing with rulers whose power is unlimited. Start 
 not up, he says, as though giving a manual or guide to a 
 courtier in an Eastern court, ' quit not thy place because 
 satrap or ruler bursts out in wrath against thee.' If the spirit 
 of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place : for yielding 
 pacifieth great offences (verse 4). ' Bear it patiently ; a calm 
 forbearance will outlive many storms of passion.' And then, 
 in half-veiled and cautious language, he speaks of the inera- 
 dicable evils of Oriental or semi-oriental courts, where the 
 
IX.] Chapter x. 1-14. 119 
 
 barber and the eunuch hold the reins of power. There is 
 an evil which I have seen tinder the su?i, as an error which 
 proceedeth from the ruler ; folly is set iii great dignity, and the 
 rich sit in low place. I have seen slaves, he whispers, upon 
 horses, and princes walking as slaves tipon the earth (vv. 5, 
 
 6, 7)- 
 
 What a field for illustration the words suggest ! What a 
 touch of satire on ages of monotonous misgovernment ! But, 
 he seems to add, in the eighth and three following verses, 
 ' bear such evils quietly. Do not be too eager to rush forth 
 to amend them. Eastern subject. Eastern statesman, be wary 
 and on thy guard.' 
 
 He that diggeth a pit tnay chance to fall into it. 
 
 He that taketh defwn a stone wall, so the word hedge should ^ 
 be turned, ?tiay disturb a sleepitig serpent. The taking dozvn — 
 or is it the quarrying.? 0/ stones, the 7nere hetuing of trees and 
 wood is a task of danger. Another warning, If the axe 
 which you use is blunt, you must put forth tenfold strength : 
 wisdom ivill give edge a7id ease to all your efforts. Once 
 more. If a serpent bite for lack of charming, the serpent ^ 
 chai-mer will be 710 gainer, or, of 710 avail (vv. 8, 9, 10, 11). 
 
 They are all maxims suggesting wariness and caution in 
 dealing with the powers that be ; powers evidently neither 
 loved nor trusted by him who teaches the way to deal with 
 them. He turns aside for one moment to pour contempt 
 upon ' the fool,' the wise man's opposite : 
 
 A wise via7is ivords gai7i hi7n grace aiid favour ; the lips of 
 a fool swalloiv up himself ; are his own worst enemies. 
 
 He begins with zvords of folly, he ends with worse, ivith 
 mischief and madness. 
 
 He is full of words, endless in loquacity. He has no 
 
 ^ ' Whoso breaketh through a fence, a serpent shall bite him. 
 Whoso heweth out stones shall be hurt therewith,' R. V. 
 
 ^ ' If the serpent bite before it be charmed, then is there no advantage 
 in the charmer,' R. V. 
 
I20 Lectures on Eeelesiastes. [ix. 
 
 sense of ignorance. Mati camiot tell ivhat shall be ; afid 
 what shall be after him, who can tell him ? ' Man knows not 
 what shall be : none can write or tell the story of the future. 
 The wise man is modest, the fool has no such scruple ' 
 (vv. 12, 13, 14). 
 
 ' Speech is silver, silence golden,' is a maxim with which 
 we are familiar ; there are many such maxims, far older, in 
 the East. I have heard that in an Arab tent, if one of the 
 party indulge in an unwelcome loquacity, an elder will say 
 to him, 'Pray to God' — Say thy prayers, i.e. to one greater, 
 and prate not. 
 
 He sums up his description of folly by obscure words that 
 seem to say : * The labour of a fool wearies all men : it is 
 always futile ; for he has not sense even to find his way 
 along the one great road, that which leads to the city.' The 
 labour of the foolish zvearieth every one of them, because he 
 knowefh not how logo to the city (verse 1 5). And after this fresh 
 series of adages, he turns round to the evil days in which his 
 own lot was cast; or, at all events, to the evils incident to the 
 government with which he was familiar. Woe to thee, land, 
 he cries in verse 16, tvhose hng is a child, a child in years or 
 heedless as a child ; whose princes feast in the 7nor7iing. — It 
 is a rebuke common alike to the world of the Hebrews and of 
 Cicero, aimed at those who commenced their feasts and rev- 
 elry before the morning hours of the working day were over. 
 ' Happy the land whose ruler is no upstart adventurer, but 
 the son of kingly sires, and whose princes have simple tastes; 
 who eat for manly strength, do not feast for revelry.' Woe to 
 thee, land, when thy kifig is a child, and thy princes eat in the 
 7norning I Blessed art thou, O lajid, when thy king is the son 
 of fiobles, and thy princes eat ijt due season, for strength, and 
 not for drunkejiness ! 'Through the slothfulness of rulers,' he 
 goes on to hint, 'the fabric of the state decays ; the neglected 
 roof lets the water through. And meantime there is high 
 revelry within the palace walls ; and gold and silver supply 
 
IX.] Chapter x. 14-20. 121 
 
 all their needs.' By much sloth/ulness the building dccayeth ; 
 and ihrough idleness 0/ the hands the house droppeth through. 
 A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money 
 answereth all things (vv. 7, 18, 19). We have once more a 
 touch of satire, turned, I hardly dare say to what strange 
 teaching, by commentators of all ages and creeds. We may 
 see in it a life-like glance into the condition of, shall we say, 
 some native state within our Indian frontier ? or some Eastern 
 empire tottering to its fall nearer home.? or an European 
 monarchy at the close of the last century, with luxury and 
 state in the palace, and a hungry people outside its door, and 
 the shadow of the guillotine, and head-crowned pikes and 
 September massacres, in the background .'' 
 
 ' But lay thy hand upon thy mouth,' he says in the closing 
 verse, ' give no vent to thine indignation.' Curse not the /cing, 
 no not in thy tlwught ; afid curse not the rich in thy bedcham- 
 ber : for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which 
 hath wings shall tell the matter. I will not ask you to follow 
 me into the curious and manifold misinterpretations of these 
 almost proverbial words. To you and me they speak plainly 
 enough of the universal espionage of a government that rests 
 on force, and makes no efforts to plant its foundations on 
 righteousness. Why distract you, or divert you from a serious 
 to a trifling mood, by substituting every kind of patristic or 
 rabbinical allegory for interpretation ? 
 
 We have follo\Yed our Preacher to-day through a devious 
 maze. He has brought us face to face with immemorial 
 questions, old as human thought, and has then conducted us 
 to the far-ofif by-ways and still courts of the most stagnant 
 forms of Eastern hfe ; to habits and modes of thought as far 
 as possible removed from our own. 
 
 He is now drawing near his close. The voice that has 
 spoken sometimes so clearly, sometimes so obscurely, some- 
 times so sadly, yet again and again with an attempt to win 
 cheerfulness from the very jaws of despair — will soon 
 
122 Lectures on Ecclesiasfes. 
 
 be hushed. It will go back to the silence from whence it 
 came. May we, who have followed with some touch of 
 sympathy the sadness of his words, and have tried to find 
 and recognise whatever of truer light was flashed upon his 
 soul by Him who spake to them of old by diverse measures 
 and in sundry ways, be able, not the less, but the more, to enter 
 into the higher teaching which told us lately to ' rejoice in the 
 Lord always,' to enter into the sorrows and perplexities of 
 life, and yet to be of good cheer in Him who has overcome 
 the world ! 
 
 [January io, 1885.] 
 
LECTURE X. 
 
 Chapters XI and XII. 
 
 The two closing chapters on which I must speak to-day- 
 are the only portions of the Book of Ecclesiastes which form 
 part of our Sunday Services. They are read as the First 
 Lesson on the last Sunday of the Christian Year. And if the 
 view now largely adopted be correct — a view which seems, I 
 confess, to have much to commend it — that they are the final 
 portion of the very latest of the books of the Old Testament 
 Scriptures; that they represent the sigh, so to speak, for 
 more light, the sense of weariness and dejection that falls 
 sometimes upon the troubled human spirit as the night be- 
 comes more intense before the first glimmering of dawn, we 
 feel at once the strange and striking fitness of their place, 
 intentional or otherwise, in the Calendar of our Church. 
 
 We shall find in these two short but memorable chapters the 
 same main lines of thought and feeling which we have already 
 met. There is the same under-current of practical wisdom, 
 clothing itself in a proverbial form, obscure at times as a 
 Delphic oracle, the sense lost in the integuments, so to speak, 
 of words and phrases to which we have no certain key, often 
 clear and lucid as the English or Scottish proverbs, to 
 which their language corresponds. For instance, // t's 
 better to sow the seed than to tvatch the ivind, or, He xvho stares 
 at the clouds ivill not finish his reapittg, are maxims which, in 
 one form or another, may have been as familiar to Boaz 
 
124 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [x. 
 
 and his reapers in the days of Ruth as to labouring men 
 on the vast plains of Western America, or in the cornfields of 
 Kent or Midlothian. 
 
 But they touch also, as we shall see, a deeper vein. 
 
 First, we shall find the same profound sense of the ignor- 
 ance and powerlessness of man. The secret of life, and of 
 the government of the world, will be recognised as something 
 unknown, and if not as in itself unknowable, yet as hidden 
 under an impenetrable cloud. We shall still seem to hear 
 the sad music of the words : 
 
 * Behind the veil, behind the veil.' 
 
 And secondly, we shall find a sense, just indicated before, 
 of the sweetness of life. Nature will for a moment ' fill' even 
 our sad preacher's ' lap with treasures of her own.' And for a 
 moment he will answer her smile, and accept her gifts. 
 
 For a moment only. He will still be haunted by the abiding 
 and inexorable shadow of the days of darkness, the many 
 days that are to come. 
 
 And thirdly, and as before, he will yet once more bid men 
 rejoice, rejoice in the sense of youth, and use the hours of 
 sunlight that are given, before the everlasting night falls upon 
 their little day. 
 
 All this, nearly all this, we have had, you will say, before. 
 But two or three fresh elements of thought will show 
 themselves. 
 
 There is one, the sad and gloomy picture of old age and 
 life's decay, that will give a darker hue to the 'dusky strand 
 of death, inwoven here ' with all the tissues of the joys of life. 
 But one or two others will contain within them the germs, 
 the germs only, of a higher teaching which was yet to come ; 
 that teaching in the light of which we can read without 
 dismay the words in which he pictures the trouble of his soul. 
 
 I. First, he will speak to us, in clearer accents than before, of 
 a judgment, a future, an unerring, a Divine judgment. He 
 
X.] Chapters xi, xii. 125 
 
 will insert the warning in the very heart of his call to 
 enjoyment ; as a salt that should save human joy from cor- 
 ruption and rottenness. And the last words of the epilogue 
 that closes the book which holds his thoughts, whether 
 written by himself or another, will repeat and emphasise the 
 truth. The Judge of all the world will yet do right. 
 
 II. And, secondly, he will hover on the very verge of a surer 
 hope of life beyond the grave. I shall not venture to tell you, 
 as many will tell you, that he is commissioned fully to reveal 
 and announce that hope. But his hand will be on the 
 opening door. ' The dust goes to dust.' ' The spirit,' he 
 will tell us, ' mounts up to the keeping of the God who 
 gave it.' 
 
 I have given this summary of his thoughts before entering 
 on them in detail. Some such guidance may aid as well 
 as interest you. And you, my friends, if I may so call this, 
 to me, almost pathetically interesting congregation of, for the 
 most part, total strangers, who have thus far followed me so 
 patiently, will bear with me if I have trespassed once more 
 on your forbearance and your time. 
 
 Let us now follow the course of the Preacher's own 
 words ; of his own, so far as we can catch their sometimes 
 doubtful meaning ; not of the strange glosses, and sometimes 
 astounding interpretations, with which they have been so 
 often overlaid and darkened. 
 
 We open the eleventh chapter. He leaves, in the first 
 verse, the atmosphere of the court, and comes back to the 
 sphere of life's common duties. Cast thy bread, he says, 
 upoji the ivaters. Do not be afraid of showing kind- 
 ness, even where thou seest no prospect of result or re- 
 turn ; let the flat cake of bread, the type of food to the 
 hungry, aid to the needy, float down the stream of life. 
 Thou wilt find one day that thou hast hit thy mark ; won 
 some grateful heart. Cast thy thread upon the waters ; for 
 thou shalt find it after many days. Do good, said He who 
 
126 Lectures on Ecclesiasies. [x. 
 
 went about doing good, hoping for nothing in return ^. Call 
 to thy feast those who cannot call thee. Thou shalt be 
 recompensed one day. Give^ our teacher goes on, a portion of 
 thy means not to one or two, but to many, to seven or even more. 
 ' Let a generous, an open-handed mercy do her full work. One 
 day, we in turn, may be in need of the aid we give to-day.' 
 Thou knowest not ivhat evil may be upon the earth. We cannot 
 alter, he repeats — a lesson familiar to him — the inexorable 
 laws by which the world is ruled. Wheti the clouds are charged 
 with rain, the rain must fall, and as the tree falls, so the tree must 
 lie ; south or north, as the tempest forces it to the ground (v. 3). 
 It is not yours to seal up the clouds, or guide the storm-wind, 
 or to give the tree strength to resist its violence. Need I detain 
 you to dwell on any one of the strange uses to which the 
 words have been applied ? ' But,' he adds, ' do not let this 
 sense of a power above thine own unnerve thy arm. Be 
 beneficent in life, be munificent ; be also active, up and 
 doing. The sower who stays his hand to watch the winds 
 will let the seed-time pass. The reaper who waits for the 
 clouds to disperse will miss the harvest.' He that observeth 
 the ivind shall not sozv ; and he that regardeth the clouds 
 shall not reap. Again, the secret of the first dawn of life is 
 hidden from thee (verse 5); dark to him, dark to the keenest 
 physiologist of our own day. So is the mystery, he adds, 
 of the working of the God who is the maker of all things ; 
 even so thou knowest not the works of God ivho viaketh all. 
 
 ' God moves in a mysterious way, 
 His wonders to perform.' 
 
 But thy course is clear. Do thou thy proper work. In the 
 morning sow, husbandman, thy seed, in the evening ivithhold 
 not thine hand. In the morning of hfe be active ; slumber not 
 through its decline. Use well the gifts of youth; use, too, 
 the special gifts of age. Thou knowest not which shall bear 
 
 ^ St. Luke vi. 35, and xiv. 12-14. 
 
X.] Chapter xi. 1-9. 127 
 
 good fruit : it may be both. For thou knowest not which 
 shall prosper, ivhether this or that, or whether they both shall 
 be alike good (verse 6. R. V.). And then follows once more the 
 old familiar call, not to beneficence, not to activity, but to 
 the full enjoyment of life's gladder, simpler side. ' Ah,' he 
 says, for the first time, in the seventh verse, ' life is sweet.' 
 Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to 
 behold the sujt. The sight of the travelling sun, to see which 
 is with him, as with the Homer with whom he may possibly 
 have been familiar, a synonym for life, no longer fills him, as 
 it once did, with weariness and gloom. But he cannot rise to 
 the glad message of nature, to the momentary throbbing of life 
 within his veins. He remembers, even through enjoyment and 
 sunshine, the long days of darkness ; that he must pass in due 
 time ' from sunlight to the sunless land.' Truly the light is 
 sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun : 
 but if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all ; yet let him 
 remember the days of darkness; for they shall be 7nany. All 
 that cometh is vanity (verse 8). Yes, all that lies before him, 
 he tells us once more, is vanity. 
 
 But for all this, he utters for the seventh and last time, 
 the call to a cheerful use of life's common gifts. He 
 utters it in somewhat altered form, and for the first time 
 balances it and steadies it with a strain of a higher mood. 
 Rejoice, young man, in thy youth ; 
 
 ' If nature put not forth her power 
 About the opening of the flower. 
 Who is it that could live an hour?' — 
 
 Rejoice, young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee 
 in the days of thy youth ; and, he adds boldly, walk in the ways 
 of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes (verse 9). 
 
 I will not detain you with the various modes in which 
 commentators, and even translators, have shown their terror, 
 their horror, at the words ; how the one have wrested their 
 
128 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [x. 
 
 plain sense, the other freely inserted a negative here, a 
 qualifying adverb there ; made them contain nothing more 
 than an almost conventional admonition to a guarded and 
 blameless life. Let us take them as they stand, take them 
 with what follows, as a lesson of freedom, followed by a lesson 
 of responsibility. For then comes, for the first time clearly 
 expressed, what before has been a dim thought just seen, 
 then put by. But know thou, that for all these things God 
 will bring thee into judgment. For all this, remember that 
 thou art not a mere animal of higher type, free to gratify 
 each prevailing instinct at thy pleasure. There is a 
 judgment before thee. For all these things God will bring 
 thee into judgtnent. Thou must stand one day before His 
 judgment-seat. 
 
 To the question, what and where is this judgment ? he has 
 no answer, no clear answer. Do we think, as some bid us, 
 of the civil or social penalties which may wait on unbridled 
 indulgence 1 or of the physical decay and pain which may 
 one day visit those who live in violation of the laws of 
 health .? We turn from the thought of either suggestion with a 
 sense that it is inadequate, utterly inadequate, to fill up 
 the framework of the words, terrible in their naked simplicity: 
 Know thou, that /or all this God will bring thee to judgment. Let 
 us leave them where we find them, written side by side with 
 the call to enjoyment, hanging, as it were, in the sky — vague, 
 undefined, unexplained, yet not to be conjured away or treated 
 as of little moment. 
 
 And therefore, he goes on, with this to guide thee, remove 
 sorrow from thy heart, and put away pain from thy flesh ; 
 afflict not thy body by any hermit's rule; for those early days 
 of life, childhood and youth, are but vanity ; they pass and 
 are gone ; they will be gathered to ' the days that are no 
 more.' But God's judgment will not pass (v. lo.) 
 
 Strange mingling of the call not to put aside the fleeting 
 joys of life with the warning voice that tells of judgment to 
 
X.] Chapter yi\. (), lo; xii. 1-3. 129 
 
 come ! And the two voices are mingled in the accents of the 
 stately and majestic passage with which his closing chapter 
 opens (chapter xii. i). 
 
 Remember thy Creator — Him who made thee, Him who will 
 judge thee — /« the days of thy youth and strength. It will be 
 too late to turn to Him when they are gone. Remember Him 
 now, ere the evil days come, or the years of ivhich thou shalt 
 SO)', I have no pleasure in thefn. 
 
 And then follows the world-famous picture of decay and 
 death. It is a picture not necessarily of old age in itself; 
 but of old age viewed on the side of its being the mere 
 decline through pain and weakness to the grave. We 
 who have known, thank God, how many souls have been 
 enabled to look on the days of such decline as no evil 
 days, but to take gently the lessons of faihng strength, and to 
 use what strength is left for the good of others and the 
 service of God, need not shrink from this dark picture. Still 
 less will we attempt to destroy its impressive effect by analys- 
 ing every successive image, and reducing it to a hideous cata- 
 logue of the decay of each separate organ of the body. Let 
 me read them with no more paraphrase — at times conjectural 
 paraphrase — than is necessary to remove obscurity and bring 
 out their pathetic force. 
 
 The light of youth will have fled, and darkness, so often 
 associated with pain and sorrow, will have come. Remember thy 
 Creator, ere the sun and the daylight and the moon and stars be 
 darkened; ere, he goes on, the clouds return after the rain. The 
 passing shower will have been replaced by unending and cease- 
 less gloom. ' The tear forgot as soon as shed, the sunshine of 
 the breast,' will have given place to habitual sadness. Jn the 
 day, he continues — calling up before us the image of a busy 
 household ceasing from their daily tasks and pleasures, under 
 the paralysing terror of some unearthly darkness — in the day 
 when the keepers of the house, the door-keepers and sentinels, 
 shall tremble ; and the strong men, the lords of the house, 
 
 K 
 
 sy 
 
130 Lectures on Ecclesiastes. [x. 
 
 its stately masters, shall bow their heads, and the poor women 
 grinding corn at evening become few, and cease their labour ; 
 and the ladies who look from the casements are wrapped in 
 darkness ; and the door is closed towards the hushed street ; 
 and the sound, once so loud, of the busy handmill is faint, and 
 the shrill cry of the storm-bird rings high, and all the 
 daughters of music (is it the song-birds, or the singing 
 women ?) are brought low, are hushed and silent. 
 
 ' Then there shall be terror of that which is in the sky above, 
 and fear shall beset the highway ' — it is a picture of gloom 
 and darkness enveloping the scene. ' In the days,' he goes on, 
 though his meaning is, for a moment, lost in the obscurity of 
 his language, melodious and rhythmical, but exceedingly per- 
 plexing, ' in the days when the dainty almond shall no longer 
 please the palate, nor salted locust, nor caper-berry, nor aught 
 else, bring back the failing appetite ^. For man is going to 
 his long, his eternal home, and the procession of mourners, 
 the professional mourners of the East, is already moving along 
 the street.' ' Remember,' he says, ' thy Creator, ere the day 
 of death ; ere the silver cord be loosened which lets fall and 
 shivers the golden bowl that feeds with oil the lamp of life ; ere 
 the pitcher lie shattered by the spring, and the fountain of life 
 can no longer be replenished ; ere the broken wheel stand idly 
 by the well-side' (vv. 2-6). We listen to the melancholy 
 cadence of these touching images. We turn from the long- 
 drawn anatomical explanations of men who would replace 
 with a dissector's report a painter's touch, a poet's melody. 
 
 ' Then,' so he ends, ' all will be over ; dust will go back to 
 dust. The elements will be set free, and be mingled with 
 their kind. But the spirit,' he adds, the spirit of which he 
 spoke so doubtingly before^ 'will mount upward to the God 
 
 ' I need hardly say that the sense of these three clauses is doubtful 
 to the last degree ; and the almond tree shall blossom, and the grass- 
 hopper shall be a burden, and the caper-berry shall fail, R. V. 
 
 ^ iii. 21. See p. 77. 
 
X.] Chaptci' xii. 4-8. 131 
 
 who gave it.' Theyi shall the dust return to the earth as it 
 was : and the spirit shall rtturri utito God who gave it. It 
 was a gift from Him, that spirit. To Him it will return. 
 More he says not. Its absorption, the re-entering of the 
 human unit into the eternal and unknown spirit, would 
 be a thought, it would seem, alien to a Hebrew. But we 
 must not press his words too far. As just now he spoke 
 of a judgment, but gave us no picture of the sheep on the 
 right hand, the goats on the left, so here he has no more to 
 say, no clear and dogmatic assertion of a conscious and 
 separate future life. Into Thy hands I coinme7id my spirit, 
 said the trustful Psalmist. Father, into Thy hajids I com- 
 nmid my spirit, said He who bowed His head upon the 
 Cross, who tasted death for our sakes. Our Preacher leaves 
 the spirit with its God, that is all — and that is much. * God 
 will call us to judgment,' he has said ; and now he adds, ' The 
 body moulders, the spirit passes back to the God who gave it.' 
 
 His tale is told. 
 
 Let me add a few words on the few verses that yet remain. 
 They form, it will be seen at once, an Epilogue to the work. 
 The word, the mysterious word, translated 'The Preacher,' 
 comes again into use. The opening words — the text, as it 
 were — of the prologue are repeated. Vanity of vanities ^, 
 saith the Preacher, all is vanity. The author is no longer 
 speaking to us in the first person, but is spoken of in the 
 third. We note at once the change. 
 
 Hence it is widely held that all these verses were added by 
 some other and later writer ; and though I incline m}'self to 
 believe that they belong to the original work, and reassume 
 the form in which its opening words were clothed, yet I shall 
 not venture to say that this is a point absolutely beyond dis- 
 pute, or to claim the striking verse with which the epilogue 
 ends as incontestably and beyond all doubt the writer's own. 
 
 ' I have, it will be seen, taken the view that these words belong to 
 the Epilogue rather than to the preceding paragraph. 
 
 K 3 
 
132 Lectures 071 Ecclesiastes. [x. 
 
 Whoever speaks, speaks of the author, in verse 9, as of a 
 wise man who taught much, studied much, set in order many 
 wise sayings, proverbs, or parables, instructive language 
 clothed in metaphor, the favourite mode of Eastern teaching ; 
 sacred, need I say, to us, servants of the Great Master of 
 parables. He adds, in verse 10, that he aimed to speak at 
 once zvords that ivould please and words ivhich were true ; 
 words which would be at once goads to the intellect, and yet 
 stakes that would uphold and stay the soul of man, both 
 coming alike from the same great teacher, the one Shepherd ^ 
 
 Then there comes a warning : ' Listen to the words of 
 wisdom.' Ajid further, by these, my son, be admonished: of 
 making 7?iany books there is no end ; and much study is 
 a weariness of the flesh. ' Beware of mere multitudes of 
 books, of endless study and reading.' ■ // is a iveariness to 
 the flesh. Whatever the lesson of the words, they point, we 
 see at once, to no early stage in a nation's history; with its 
 laborious inscriptions, carved on stone, or stamped on clay, 
 its rare writings on skins or parchment. The picture of a 
 later age, of some well-stored library, is forced upon us. 
 
 And then comes the end of all. The bitter sense of ' the 
 riddle of the painful earth ' is gone ; the call to lose it in enjoy- 
 ment is gone ; the sense that 'all is vanity' is gone. Let us hear 
 the conclusion of the xvhole 7natter : fear God, and keep His 
 com?na}idments : for this is the whole duty of man, or rather, 
 the whole of man ; the word ' duty ' is not in the original ; 
 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with evety 
 secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. 
 
 Fear God, ajid keep His commandme7its . The fear of 
 God is with the Psalmist, not the end, but the beginning of 
 
 ' Atid further, because ttie preacher was -wise, he still taught the 
 people tmo-wledge ; yea, lie pondered, and sought otit, afid set in order 
 many proverbs. The preacher souglit to find out acceptable words : and 
 that which was written uprightly, even words of truth. The words of 
 the wise are as goads, and as nails (tent s\.akt%) fastened are ttie zvords of 
 the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd, R. V. 
 
X.] Chapter yivi. f^-\^. i'^'}, 
 
 wisdom. The Apostle speaks of ' a perfect love that casteth 
 out fear.' The dimmer light that shines through the darkness 
 of this book does not cast its beams so high. It is enough 
 if in any way it is 'a lantern to the feet' of him who walks by 
 it ; if it illuminates one, or two, or three, of the lower steps of 
 the ascent ' that mounts through darkness up to God.' Some 
 things, at least, he has held to, or won, under its guidance ; the 
 sense of a Divine Ruler ; of an eternal law of duty towards 
 Him, a law embracing the whole man, body, soul, and spirit ; 
 and of a day when every secret thing shall be revealed, all 
 wrongs righted, all evil judged. 
 
 When shall that judgment be .? Where shall that throne be 
 set? What is the nature, what the relation to us, of that 
 God whom we are to fear.? How is He revealed to us.? 
 How are we to keep His commandments.? What are those 
 commandments 1 
 
 For an answer to these questions we must turn elsewhere. 
 The pilgrim with whom we have walked, walked through the 
 very valley of the shadow of death, still bears his burden as we 
 part from him ; we leave him still climbing the Hill Difficulty ; 
 his feet are still bleeding, and if discrowned, he wears a crown 
 of sorrow. But his steps are upward, his face forward, and 
 before him, unseen and dimly guessed, are the Everlasting 
 Hills, and the light of God's presence, and a Divine Reve- 
 lation yet to come. 
 
 May his pain and distress, his wanderings and gloom, his 
 brighter moments or heavenward glances, not have been in 
 vain for us, who have watched them from a vantage ground 
 which it was not his to reach ! And, may He who flashed 
 into his darkened soul those nobler truths, sustain, enlighten 
 and uphold those whom the same shadows haunt, the same 
 darkness clouds, and lead them and all of us, step by step, 
 to perfect day ! 
 
 [January 17, 1885.] 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AMEN CORNER, E.G. 
 
Date Due 
 
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BS1475.8.B81 
 
 Lectures on Ecclesiastes : delivered in 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00051 7708 
 
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