After that the Judgment

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.—Ecclesiastes 11:9The greater part of the Book of Ecclesiastes is of a sombre character. It records the experiences of one who sought on all sides and with passionate eagerness for that which would satisfy the higher wants of his nature—the hunger and thirst of the soul—but who sought in vain. Ordinary coarse, sensual pleasures soon lost their charm for him; for he deliberately tried—a dangerous experiment—to see if in self-indulgence any real satisfaction could be found. From this failure he turned to a more promising quarter. He sought in “culture,” the pursuit of beauty and magnificence in art, the pathway to the highest good, on the discovery of which his soul was set. He used his great wealth to procure all that could minister to a refined taste. He built palaces, planted vineyards and gardens and orchards; he filled his palaces with all that was beautiful and costly, and cultivated every pleasure that is within the reach of man. “Whatsoever mine eyes desired,” he says, “I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy.… Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on all 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.” From this he turned to the joys and employments of an intellectual life—acquired knowledge and wisdom, studied the works of nature, analyzed human character in all its phases, and applied himself to the study of all those great problems connected with the moral government of the world and the destiny of the soul of man. Here he was baffled. The discoveries he made were, he found, useless for curing any of the evils of life, and at every point he met with mysteries which he could not solve, and his sense of failure and defeat convinced him that though “wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness,” it does not satisfy the soul.

What, then, is the result of his inquiries, of his pain and labour in searching after the highest good? Do his speculations leave anything untouched which may reasonably be the object of our pursuit, and which may afford us the satisfaction for which he sought in vain in so many quarters? Does he decide that life is, after all, worth living, or is his conclusion that it is not? In the closing sections of his book some answer is given to these questions; something positive comes as a pleasing relief from all the negations with which he had shut up one after another of the paths by which men had sought and still seek to attain to lasting happiness. Two conclusions might have been drawn from the experience through which he had passed. “Since the employments and enjoyments of life are insufficient to give satisfaction to the soul’s craving, why engage in them, why not turn away from them in contempt, and fix the thoughts solely on a life to come?” an ascetic might ask. “Since life is so transitory, pleasure so fleeting, why not seize upon every pleasure, and banish every care as far as possible?” an epicurean might ask—“Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die.” Neither of these courses finds any favour in the mature judgment of the writer who draws his teaching from the experience of the Jewish king. “Rejoice,” he says, rebuking the ascetic; “know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement,” he adds, for the confusion of the epicurean. He speaks with the authority of one who had fully considered the problems of life, and with the solemnity of one whose earthly career was hastening to its close; and he addresses himself to the young, as more likely to profit by his experience than those over whom habits of life and thought have more power. The counsel which the Preacher has to give is bold and startling. “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.”

The writer appears to have come under the influence of Greek philosophy. An accomplished scholar has been able to point out some remarkable coincidences between the sayings of Heraclitus and the sayings of Ecclesiastes. There are, moreover, passages in the book which furnish striking parallels to the Epicurean philosophy as it is interpreted by Lucretius. It is not surprising that thinkers, pondering the mysteries of the universe and the strangely complicated drama of human life, should have fallen into the same vein, should have been struck by the same problems, and have given utterance to similar thoughts respecting them. The melancholy, the questioning, the scepticism, which are found in Ecclesiastes, have been found in the Eastern mystics, and in poets so far removed from Ecclesiastes and from one another as Shakespeare and Tennyson. Thoughts like these are not the product of one age, or one country, or one philosophical school. They are the common heritage of all deeply moved hearts and minds. Still it must be admitted that the Jewish mind was not naturally reflective, it was averse from speculation, and it is at least not improbable that the thought of this Jewish preacher may have been coloured by Greek philosophy.1 [Note: J. J. S. Perowne.]

I

The Joy of Youth

“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth.”

God does not grudge us joy. God’s own life is a life of joy. Although His life is a life of calm, unruffled joy, yet it is a life of joy none the less. It is not the calm of stagnation; it is not the calm of a life in which there is nothing to move it. It is more like the calm of that great tide of which Tennyson speaks, “too full for sound and foam.” It is the calm of an intense joy, so great, so unbroken, that it is always still. And God who has Himself this fulness of joy desires to see that joy shared by His creatures. That was the very reason why He made them, and He made them with that capacity for joy and that desire for joy, and He set all round about them in this wonderful world the things that might help them to be joyful.

Dante and Virgil, as they traverse the gloomy circles of the Inferno, come upon a stagnant and putrid fen, and there, buried in the black mud, they see the souls of the gloomy-sluggish, who in expiation of their sinful gloom in life, are ever forced to mutter—

We were sad

In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun,

Now in this miry darkness are we sad.

To be sad in the sunshine was a crime in the great poet’s eyes, and the poets and prophets of Scripture were herein at one with him. For the Psalmist says, “Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous”; and Isaiah, “Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness”; and St. Paul, “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.”1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, In the Days of Thy Youth, 92.]

1. To be young is itself a privilege and a joy. The blessing of youth is joy: the blessing of mature life is work: the blessing of old age is peace. The young are all for enjoyment; the middle-aged all for achievement; the aged all for rest. It is the highest wisdom of young people to retain their youthfulness of heart and life as long as possible. It is no reproach to be young; it is one of those priceless privileges which are all the more precious because we can none of us be young for long, and we can never be young more than once. Half the miseries of youth come from the undue haste of those who wish to leave it behind them—so missing the vigour of their manhood, and the peace of their old age.

Pitt, who was Prime Minister of England when twenty-four, was once taunted by an old man with his extreme youth. “The atrocious crime of being a young man,” he said, “I shall not attempt to palliate or deny, but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience.” Therefore, let all rejoice in their youth, who have their life before them; let them not rob youth of its chief charm by despising it, and hurrying out of it before their time.2 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones.]

2. A peculiar joy belongs to youth, because of the novelty and vividness of early sensations, feelings and perceptions. It is indeed one of the features of youth that we are able to find pleasure in so many things, whereas older people are able to find pleasure in fewer things. This is at once our glory, and our peril. Every sensibility and faculty of our nature is richly stored with vital force, and with the power to realize life vividly and fully. The process of growing old usually involves the gradual loss of this freshness. But there are some people who do not seem to grow old in this way; they retain to the end the faculty of realizing the freshness of life; happy are they. And we shall find that those who do retain this power longest are just those who, when they were young, were careful with their pleasures as with their health; feeding their mind on the simplicities of life; taking care not to pall their appetites with too prodigal a feast; entering into the enjoyment of pleasure with a self-contained heart; and, above all, thinking not so much of enjoyment as of something higher and better, which brought enjoyment in its train unsought—as a gift thrown in to those worthy to receive it.

“Live as long as you may,” said Southey, “the first twenty years are the longest half of your life, and they are by far the most pregnant in consequences.” It was Robert Burns who sighed:

O man! while in thy early years,

How prodigal of time!

Mis-spending all the precious hours,

Thy glorious youthful prime!

3. Another source of joy in youth is found in its idealism. Every healthy-minded youth is an idealist. This power of the ideal runs through the whole of life. It is found in the friendships of youth, giving them a warmth and an unselfishness that we do not often see in older people—unless in the case of friendships that date from boyhood and girlhood, which are among the richest possessions of life; for “blessed are they who can boast of old friends.” It is to be seen in the ambitions of youth, surrounding the objects of desire like a halo. And it is the most beautiful element in the religion of young people, that it fills them with innumerable ideals, and makes the unseen, the immaterial, and the Divine glow with a reality of beauty and a pulse of power which are at the root of almost everything worth talking of in the history of mankind. On every side human life sinks to the level of mechanism when it ceases to establish and declare the ideals by which it lives. It is not so much the embodiment of the ideal and the actual attainment of the end as it is the assertion of the ideal, the positing of the goal—“the will to believe,” as Professor James puts it so forcefully; it is this that constitutes the power of idealization.

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me:

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.

Isaac D’Israeli said, “Almost everything great has been done by youth.” “The first open look of young eyes on the condition of the world is one of the principal regenerative forces of humanity.” One never knows what may come of a young man’s thoughts and fancies and ideals. This idealizing faculty is also one of the richest sources of joy, whether it comes to play in love, friendship, work, or religion. And it is peculiarly a youthful joy. Therefore, said the Preacher, “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth.”1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones.]

4. The sage recommends the young man to rejoice in his youth, because the opportunity will soon pass away. We are not listening to a Christian moralist, nevertheless the sentiment is Christian. “Childhood and youth are vanity”; that is to say, they are transient, fleeting. “Therefore,” say a certain class of religionists, “extinguish their natural instincts as summarily as possible. They are transient, therefore they are of no account. They are ‘vanity,’ therefore to enjoy them is dangerous, if it be not sinful.” But the logic of the Preacher takes a different line. Childhood and youth, or youth and manhood, are fleeting; therefore “Banish sorrow from thy mind, and put away sadness from thy body.” He evidently does not think the brevity and transitoriness of a thing is a reason for despising it.

The rose which you pluck in the morning withers before the next morning, but you delight yourself with its colour and perfume none the less while it lasts. A summer morning, with its dewy freshness, is a thing of only an hour or two; but you do not, for that reason, shut yourself up in your chamber, and refuse to breathe the morning scents, and to look upon the sparkle of the dewdrops. Youth and fresh manhood are things of only a few years; but their brevity is, to the Preacher, the reason why they should be enjoyed. Those have done infinite damage who have set on foot the notion that youth, from the moment it turns to religion, surrenders all pleasure, lightness of heart, and robust enjoyment; and such teachers have been betrayed into this terrible and fatal mistake through their failure to see that God’s training is not to stunt or to crush out human nature, but to develop and elevate it.1 [Note: M. R. Vincent, God and Bread, 191.]

It seems to me that the Gospel of the Transfiguration should be more widely proclaimed among us. The poets sing of it, the mystics show it, even the scientific men have some foreshadowings; but in the common ways of men it is unheard. “God is Joy itself.” Where is the man who shall preach with power to the multitude of the transfiguring of pleasure into joy, as well as of the like transfiguring of pain? “Joy, then,” says Myers, “I will boldly affirm, is the aim of the Universe; that Joy which is the very bloom of Love and Wisdom; and men’s souls need attuning to that inconceivable delight.”2 [Note: A Modern Mystic’s Way.]

What in Aurelius was a passing expression, was in [the Christian] Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. It was, in fact, we may say, nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect; the outward expression of which, like a physical light upon human faces, from the land which is very far off, we may trace from Giotto, and even earlier, to its consummation in the purer and better work of Raffaelle—the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, the blitheness of those who had been indeed delivered from death, of which the utmost degree of that famed Greek blitheness or Heiterkeit is but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth.3 [Note: Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean.]

II

The Sobering Sense of Responsibility

“But know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.”

The second part of the text is not meant to destroy or neutralize the concession of the first sentence, but only to purify and ennoble a gladness which, without it, would be apt to be stained by many a corruption, and to make permanent a joy which, without it, would be sure to die down into the miserable, peevish, and feeble old age of which the grim picture follows, and to be quenched at last in death.

1. God intends us to live for something better than pleasure. Pleasure as relaxation is right enough, but when we make it our chief business it becomes sin. A butterfly life of vain frivolity and amusement is to prostitute the purpose of our living. God has sent us into the living world to cultivate our spiritual nature by His service. We are created for God, and we answer the end of our being only when we consecrate our lives to His glory. Anything short of making God the supreme object of our reverence and affection is to miss the great end of life. We may indulge in no sinful pleasure, and in no pleasure that is in any degree questionable: but if we make pleasure our god, the thing for which we live, then it is sin. This is to disobey the first command of the law, “Thou shalt have none other gods before me.”

There is always the temptation of youth to think that, because things are lawful one cannot have too much of them. Charles Lamb tells us, in one of his delightful essays, of certain people who set a house on fire in order that they might enjoy the rapture of eating roast sucking-pig. That is very much like the action of those who burn up every grave and sober thing in the lire of pleasure and sport. Laughter is a pleasant thing, but a perpetual cackle and grin is the sure mark of an idiot. Enjoyment is a gift of God, but to sacrifice and forget everything else for it is to prostitute God’s gift to the service of the devil.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough.]

2. A man’s mature years are a sort of judgment on the enjoyments and work of his earlier days. If his pleasures have been impure, shameful, and wrong; if he has been habitually guilty of excess in the indulgence of appetites, in drink, smoking, or anything akin to that; it all follows him into the real work of life, and unfits him for it. He goes forth into the world with a corrupted and diseased imagination, perhaps with a weakened body, and certainly with a debilitated mind. And if his early life has been of the frivolous, sportive, self-indulgent kind, if he has not hardened himself a little in severer things, by laying up a preparation of knowledge, by getting acquainted with the best thoughts of men, he is handicapped in all the race of life.

Perhaps there is no commoner delusion than that we may give our youth to vanity and rejoice with thoughtlessness and yet catch up the duties of life at some onward point more vigorously than if we had not known youthful madness and folly. All such imaginations are broken against the great retributive law which runs throughout life and pervades every phase of it. If we give the rein to our pleasure-loving tendencies, and walk in the ways of our heart, unmindful of higher things, the “lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” will take hold of us till we not only do not think of higher things, but do not care to think of them, or even despise them as dreams of an impracticable Puritanism. There will grow from self-indulgence, deadness of heart; and from the love of pleasure, atheism of desire, till the very beauty of the natural life is worn away, and we fall into a selfishness which is capable neither of satisfaction nor of hope.1 [Note: Principal Tulloch, Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 243.]

In his essay on Burns, Carlyle refers to that period in the poet’s life when, as a mere youth, he leaves the paternal roof and “goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those vices which,” says Carlyle, “a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural preparative for entering on active life; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much,” he continues, “with this class of philosophers; we hope they are mistaken: for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet but to yield to them, and even serve for a time in their leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the training one receives in this Devil’s service, but only our determining to desert from it, that fits us for true manly Action.”

3. This judgment may carry approval and reward no less than penalty. Whenever this book may have been written, we find in it numerous allusions to a state of society which give these words about a future judgment a peculiar meaning and force; for the book depicts a society under a capricious despotism, with all its corruptions and miseries. The wealthy revel in palaces, vineyards, and pleasure-grounds; kings are childish, and princes given to revelry and drunkenness; fools are uplifted, and noble men degraded; riches are not for the intelligent, or favour for the learned; to become rich is to multiply extortions; life stands at the caprice of power; sensuality runs riot. In short, the whole political fabric was falling into disrepair and decay, the rain leaking through the rotting roof; while the miserable people were ground down with ruinous exactions, in order that the rulers might revel on undisturbed. And as the book reveals this fearful social condition, so, likewise, it gives expression to the temper which grows up in men’s minds after a long course of such oppressions—a kind of fatalism and hopelessness which tempts one to yield passively to the current of affairs, to believe that God has ceased to rule, and that order and right have vanished from the world, to snatch at every pleasure, to drown care in sensuality rather than try to maintain an integrity which is sure to be rewarded with personal and social ruin. That kind of temper, if it once gains headway, will affect all classes and ages. In the nobler and better-seasoned characters, it becomes a proud despair; in vulgar minds, a bestial greed, and an untramelled selfishness; in youth, a prompter to unbounded sensuality.

We can see, therefore, what a powerful antidote to this temper would be furnished by the truth of a righteous judgment. Once lodge firmly the truth that men are moving on through all the hard and bitter and unjust conditions of their time to a supreme tribunal, and you have made it impossible to believe that the world is lawless. A final judgment implies a law; and a law implies a lawgiver, and an authority to administer and vindicate the law. Thus the truth carries with it both comfort and obligation. There is a Divine order in the world; we are not finally at the mercy of chance or of men’s caprice: the order will vindicate itself in time, and with itself will vindicate those who hold by it. So long as there is judgment, wrong is not eternal, and retribution is a fact. Therefore, it is better to do right, notwithstanding the “oppressor’s wrong and the proud man’s contumely.” One can afford to be cheerful, even amid oppressions and troubles like these, if the time is short and a day is coming in which wrong shall be righted and worth acknowledged and fidelity rewarded.

A great German thinker has it, in reference to the history of nations, that the history of the world is the judgment of the world; and although that is not true if it is a denial of a day of final judgment, it is true in a very profound and solemn sense with regard to the daily life of every man, that, whether there be a judgment-seat beyond the grave or not, and whether this Preacher knew anything about that or not, there is going on through the whole of a man’s life, and evolving itself, this solemn conviction that we are to pass away from this present life. All our days are knit together as one whole. Yesterday is the parent of to-day, and to-day is the parent of all the tomorrows. The meaning and the deepest consequence of man’s life is that no feeling, no thought that flits across the mirror of his life and heart dies utterly, leaving nothing behind it. But rather the metaphor of the Apostle is the true one, “That which thou sowest that shalt thou also reap.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

4. The teaching of this Old Testament sage needs to be supplemented by later revelation. He has made us indeed realize the essential soundness of life. He has given us a clear vision of its dignity and worth. He has made us feel that life is to be received with joy, and pursued with enthusiasm and courageous zeal. He has led us to the conviction that God’s approval is upon His own work, and upon the zest and joy with which men undertake that work. But he lacked what the men of the Old World lacked before the keels of Columbus’s caravels grazed the shore of the New—viz., knowledge that the New World is here. He lacked what men lacked whose sky was a firmament and whose stars brightly studded that solid dome; he lacked the sense of the open sky, the myriad vastness of the world of stars, the sense of a universe fulfilling itself in an eternity of years. Had this lack and limitation been absent, it is more than likely that he would not have written his closing chapter with the melancholy description of the breaking-down of life. He might have written instead in the spirit of Rabbi Ben Ezra:

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith “A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!”

As Jean Paul says: “We desire virtue, not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded than joy can; it is its own reward.” And so sings Tennyson, turning the vision of the great German to music in one of his own deathless lyrics:

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea—

Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong—

Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she:

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.

Literature

Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 134.

Dawson (G.), Sermons on Daily Life, 105.

Dewhurst (F. E.), The Investment of Truth, 257.

Farrar (F. W.), In the Days of Thy Youth, 88.

Greenhough (J. G.), in Comradeship and Character, 59.

Griffith-Jones (E.), in Comradeship and Character, 133.

James (J. A.), Sermons, i. 348.

Jowett (B.), College Sermons, 127.

Kingsley (C.), True Words for Brave Men, 148.

Lamb (R.), School Sermons, ii. 1.

Morgan (G. E.), Dreams and Realities, 55.

Thomas (J.), Sermons (Myrtle Street Pulpit), iii. 381.

Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 232.

Vincent (M. R.), God and Bread, 189.

Christian World Pulpit, vii. 20 (W. Spensley); xxxiii. 149 (J. J. S. Perowne).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, xiii. 470 (C. Lowell).