good a course of lectures on Ecclesiastes as on Job), who says that in the great record of the spiritual history of the chosen and typical race, a place has here been 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.' This too may also be added, that if the Book of Ecclesiastes is sad, it is sincere; and if it lacks enthusiasm, it lacks also those dark shadows which enthusiasm so often casts, intolerance, cruelty or pride.

The writer of Job had sounded the depths of human misery, and his indictment of Providence goes further than anything in Ecclesiastes. Yet Ecclesiastes is a far sadder book than Job. Where one sees sorrow, the other sees emptiness; where one deplores unrighteous inequality, the other complains of vapid monotony. The author of Job was far too passionately absorbed in his attempt to understand the world to cry out with our later sage, 'Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.'

Job asks, 'Why do the righteous suffer?' Ecclesiastes asks, 'What is the good of righteousness, whether you suffer or whether you do not? What is the good of anything? All passes; nothing satisfies.' To these questions he can find no answer. The point to notice is not that he can find no answer, but that he asks the question. For no one, if he ask that fatal question, can answer it. Only that man possesses the answer who does not ask the question. To ask for what purpose do I seek to increase the store of wisdom, goodness and beauty in the world is implicitly to affirm that goodness, beauty and wisdom are not ends but means. And if they are means, their glory leaves them, while the end beyond them is found none the more. To ask what is the good of fulfilling the commandments of God is to imply that religious service is not in itself good, but is only helpful to an end beyond itself. But the joy of religious service cannot be gained or regained by finding out that it is a means to something else. It can only be acquired by feeling it.

§ 2. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.-The sadness of life! The world's literature is full of it, and some of the finest poetry, appealing strongly to every human heart, has this sadness for its fascinating theme. What form did it take to the author of Ecclesiastes? The two features of life which oppressed him most were seemingly these: first, its transitoriness; secondly, its monotony. Two apparently contradictory and yet often combined complaints: nothing abides, everything is always the same. Perpetual flux, perpetual recurrence. ́All is vanity,' not merely because all is transitory, but because there is nothing

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which affords any real and abiding satisfaction. Pleasure, in any sense of the word, is as transient as the things or the events which cause it. It is a strange irony. Man's life hastens on in its inevitable course and passage from birth to death: no moment stays and yet the same old round, the same old story is being repeated and repeated over and over again. The same struggles, the same failures, the same disappointments; the same gainings followed by the same losings; the same achievements succeeded by the same decays; even the same wrongdoings, the same oppressions, the same follies.

Our author wrote in a depressed and depressing age. 'He lived in a period of political servitude, destitute of patriotism. or enthusiasm. When he alludes to kings, he views them from below as one of the people suffering from their misdeeds. His pages reflect the depression produced by the corruption of an oriental despotism, with its injustice, its capriciousness, its revolutions, its system of spies, its hopelessness of reform. He must have lived when the Jews had lost their national independence, and formed but a province of the Persian empire-perhaps even later, when they had passed under the rule of the Greeks' (Driver). And as things then were, so he fancied they had ever been, and would ever be. He lost heart and lost interest; goodness for itself, wisdom for itself, seemed of no real and abiding value. To labour for his own people and his own religion, to do the will of God and to love him with all his might-these things did not suggest themselves to our author as the true resolutions of his doubts or as the true 'ends in themselves' which he so constantly sought only as constantly to deny. Shall we condemn him? True it is that one can only learn the glory or the worth of goodness by doing and being good. One can only learn to love by loving. Perhaps he left it all till it was too late.

'For who in age shall roam the earth and find
Reasons for loving that will strike out love

With sudden rod from the hard year-pressed mind?
Were reasons sown as thick as stars above,

'Tis love must see them, as the eye sees light:
Day is but Number to the darkened sight.'

The virile and vigorous complaints of Job against the moral disorder in the world around him please us better than Ecclesiastes' seeming want of strenuousness and interest. It is one thing to be saddened or perplexed by life; it is another thing to be bored by it. Did our author suffer from ennui? Had he perhaps not enough to do? Had he no one to care for, to

work for, or to love? Was he a man who looked on at the travail and trouble of life from a safe distance, and made a luxury of his own discontent? The true workers do not speak his language, just as some of the greatest lovers of God have not only been great sufferers themselves, but have seen and fought with much pain and sore evil in the world around them.

Yet must we not be too rash in our condemnation of Ecclesiastes. Directly the first chills of doubt and despair had seized him, as soon as he had begun to think seriously of life and its purposes and meanings, his cool and calm judgement exposed him to danger. He had lost his faith in the aspirations of the prophets, and the conception of a future life was yet to come. The prophets had taught that the meaning and justification of present trials lay in future glory. A time would come when strife and evildoing should cease and all mankind would love their Maker and each other. But Ecclesiastes did not share their expectations. Like the Greek philosophers, by whom he was probably influenced, he believed that if every to-morrow was not going to be much the same as to-day, there would, at any rate, be periodic successions or repeating cycles of monotonous uniformity. The idea of gradual progress had not yet been born; the hope of sudden changes by the pitying interposition of God was his no more. And even for us, a belief in the gradual improvement of the human race is not enough. We are fain to believe in the gradual improvement of the individual as well as in the improvement of the race. And partly because that belief is so necessary to our belief in God we cling to the sublime dogma of the immortality of the soul. But this belief was also wanting to the author of Ecclesiastes. He had perhaps heard it mooted, but he had not adopted it as his own. The only future life' that he, like his ancestors, believed in was the shadowy and worthless life of Sheol. If neither the race as a whole nor the individual man move forward gradually but steadily to higher things,' are we justified in too hastily condemning the saddened observer for his conclusion: 'Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas'? (Let the reader note how to the author of 'In Memoriam' the bidding to work and to endure is dependent for its validity upon the double belief in progress for the race on earth, and in progress for the individual elsewhere.' Compare especially Cantos xxxiv and cxviii.)

On the other hand, we may profitably ponder the words of Mr. Estlin Carpenter on p. 42 of his beautiful little book called The Place of Immortality in Religious Belief: If we cannot live for ever, let us use with the utmost nobleness our span of years. The righteousness for which we strive from day to day is not buried

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among distant snows; nor is the knowledge we have gained hid in the blackness of long-future night; nor is the love of wife or child or friend made nought by the eternal loneliness beyond. Whatever be the interpretation of the great enigma, these things are facts now. If the earth should burst to-morrow and we were all whirled on separate fragments into space, it would still be worth while to live our best to-day; and he who yields to the pessimist, and pronounces the world-process valueless if there be no immortality, who declares virtue a dream and God a lie, commits treason against the only realities we know, throws all the achievements of the past into confusion, and tramples the accumulations of experience into the dust.'

of man.

§ 3. A defence of the transitory.—Let us recur once more to that transitoriness which seemed to our author to cling to and to poison all human things. That the charge is false can hardly be maintained. We know and experience its truth. Lovely verse in many languages has described and bewailed the frailty and instability The uncertainty of fortune, the certainty of death, the irony of fate, the emptiness of pleasure, the disregard of desert, the triumph of folly or of luck, the failures of wisdom or of worth, the sorrows of the righteous, the successes of fools and roguesall these frequent phenomena of life have supplied themes for countless poets' pens. No one can deny that the poems thus written are founded on fact. And we can enlarge the range of our survey and admit that even the entire race of man and the earth which it inhabits is a mere transitory, come-and-go appearance in all the universe of things.

'And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'

The transitoriness of mortal things can, however, be put to very different uses. All depends upon the application. The lowest one of all is to say, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' It is just as possible, on the other hand, to say, 'Let us up and be doing, for we have no time to lose.' Again, because the most adorable of human joys inevitably pass away, that does not necessarily make them less adorable while they are actually enjoyed. The sweet

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companionship of two persons who love one another more than they love anybody else in the world-this close communion of two human beings is not the less a supreme good because it is transitory. In this shape--the union of two persons formed of body and soulit can positively never again recur, and yet it is supremely enjoyed by those who now enjoy it, supremely missed by those who have enjoyed and lost it, supremely longed for by those whom some overmastering necessity keeps asunder.

'All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of space and time decay;
But oh, the very reason why

I clasp them is because they die.'

We may therefore admit the 'transitoriness' and deny the 'vanity.' Again, it may be urged that while all those things of which the transitoriness is bewailed by the poets are indeed transitory, there are still other things left which are not. Or a thing may have two aspects, one transitory, one permanent. A good act dies as an act; its goodness lives and fertilizes. Preachers admit and emphasize the transitoriness of all 'earthly pleasures and ambitions'; they use their transitoriness as a foil by which to contrast the permanence of goodness and of wisdom. The permanence and indestructibility of these in one form or in another are conditioned and assured by the permanence and indestructibility of their source. And if there be in human life and in outward nature manifestations and qualities which betoken and require God, then these qualities and appearances cannot be empty, cannot be vain. If there be such a thing as beauty, if there be such a thing as wisdom, if there be such a thing as goodness, if there be such a thing as soul, because God is, then no thing or deed or person which displays them can possibly be vain. God and 'all is vanity' are in the last resort contradictions in terms.

§ 4. Two beliefs unharmonized and inconsistent with each other.--But this contradiction was not apparent to the author of Ecclesiastes. Or rather his belief in both was too strong to allow of either to yield unto the other. He did not so utterly believe in 'all is vanity' as to compel him to deny that God could be. His faith in God was not warm and living enough to make him realize that 'vanity' is not coextensive with 'all.' He pushed neither his faith nor his scepticism to its legitimate and logical conclusion. He probed neither unto the bottom. Professor Cornill not unjustifiably contends that the Book of Ecclesiastes may be regarded