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THE SADDEST BOOK IN THE BIBLE

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Is it unlike because it is inferior? To this question it is not easy to give a simple answer. But if either Yes or No would be inaccurate, Yes would be less inaccurate than No. Ecclesiastes is on the whole religiously inferior to the other books of the Bible, and the religious tone of it is inferior to the religious tone of all later Jewish literature.

The main and fundamental thought of Ecclesiastes is expressed in its opening words: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.' The author's reflections and his counsels either lead up to or are deduced from that one saddening assertion. Now the first characteristic note of the other books of the Bible and of all later Jewish literature is a trustful and hopeful faith in God. The grounds of that faith may vary from age to age, but its essential qualities of trustfulness and hopefulness remain unchanged. Adversity and trial, persecution and sore distress, serve only to temper and to strengthen them. And a second note of the Jewish religion in the books of the Bible and in later Jewish literature is this: the service of God is a joy. A day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.' The joy of the commandments—that is the peculiar spiritual bliss felt in fulfilling them—is a familiar Rabbinic idea lasting right down to the present day. Judaism may not be quite the same thing to you and me as to a Rabbi of the Middle Ages or to a Rabbi of Russia to-day, but so far as real spiritual joy is concerned, I am by no means sure that their Judaism was not or is not superior to ours. These two distinguishing notes of Judaism, a trustful and hopeful faith in God and the joy of religious service, were both wanting to the author of Ecclesiastes. Otherwise he could not have said, 'All is vanity.' His, therefore, is the saddest book in the Bible and in all distinctively Jewish literature.

And yet it is a very human book, and we should be sorry to miss it from the Bible. The catholicity or many-sidedness of the Bible is part of its power and its charm. The more fundamental human moods reflected in it the better. Man's life has many shadows. There is much sorrow and vanity observed and deplored in every rich human experience. Of these then also let the Bible tell. For this wonderful collection contains, as Professor Driver says, 'not only the record of a history; it exhibits also, as in a mirror, the most varied phases of human emotion, suffused and penetrated in different degrees by the Spirit of God. And so there is a mood of melancholy and sadness, to which, in one form or another, the human soul is liable; and this has found its most complete expression in Ecclesiastes.' And Professor Driver then himself quotes from Dr. Bradley, the Dean of Westminster (from whose pen we have as

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.'

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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

'OMNIA VANITAS'

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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.

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'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.)

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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

TRANSITORY JOYS AND THEIR VALUE

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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.'

§ 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 of man. 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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