Ecclesiastes 1:14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (with Genesis 1:31): — What could be more different than the tempers of mind which uttered sayings like these? Creation and life very good. Creation and life, vanity, delusion, hollowness, and vexation of spirit. Both cannot be right. But statements so diverse are easily enough explained if we remember that in the Bible we are dealing, not with a book, but with a library; not with a literary work, but with a nation's literature. It is not a pure revelation we have, but the strange eventful history of one. We may expect, therefore, to find in it great variety, and almost hopeless difference of view. The present form of that chapter of Genesis may be regarded roughly as bearing the impress of the eighth or ninth century me., the sanguine stamp of a great prophetic time. The Book of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is not earlier than the third century, when the disruption of the two kingdoms, the insecurity of an absolute and semipagan monarchy, the captivity of the nation, the setting up of the hierarchy, and the conquest by both Greek thought and Greek arms had deeply changed and saddened the spirit of Hebrew dream. Our own generation find a special attraction in this Book of Ecclesiastes. We too have fallen on an age when the first free fearless vigour of our Elizabethan time has gone by, when even the John Bull view of England is collapsing, when the condition and pros. peers of our crowded society are raising questions which only the stupid can face with a light heart, or treat with the old answers. The old pharmacopoeia of politics has no medicine for the new disease. We in England doubt and fear. Abroad they deny and destroy. In this country we are not as yet seriously troubled with the more thoroughgoing forms of pessimism; but I do not think we have escaped it, for the reason that we have not yet come to it. We are as yet only in the Agnostic stage, but we are fairly well through that, and are beginning to get dissatisfied with it. From that stage we must go either up or down. We may go up. A truer philosophy (not even now without a witness) may restore the vigour of a nobler faith. Or we may go down. We may descend to the next level of unbelief, to the lower cycle in the mind's inferno. The next level is pessimism. To deal with pessimism and to prevent pessimism we must have an ideal which is something more than an idea of ours, something more than an ambition of ours. We must have an ideal which is the fountain head of our ideas and ambitions, one which is working incessantly to bring us to its own image; one in whose presence we feel inspiration and attainment; one last and surely blended; one that is gradually filling up the abyss of pessimism by drawing together its edges and reconciling what we are with what we long to be. We must have a God, in brief, who is at once our Mighty One and our Redeemer. The solution of life is not to be found in grappling with pain, but in the conflict with sin. The strongest soul that ever lived was crushed by sins rather than pains, by sins not His own, not by the pains which were. Here lies the centre and secret of Christianity, not in the miracles of healing, but in the miracles of forgiveness, and in the Cross, the greatest of them all. And here lies the key and reason why Christianity, with all its melancholy, with all its Divine sadness, can never be pessimist. It is not simply and generally that, being a religion of faith and hope, it cannot give way to despair. But it is here, in this principle, viz. that in Christianity we never become aware of the worst till we are in possession of the best. The deepest sense of evil is possible only to a believer in redemption — not a redemption that shall be one day, but that is now going on. How could we bear to see the worst and utmost evil and sorrow, but for the sense and certainty that it has in it the sentence of its own death? How could we, as a race, face death successfully — death, the great ravager of love — except in the loving faith that death itself is wounded unto death? The best, in revealing to us the worst, abolishes it, and the light of God, which maketh all things manifest, brings sin out only that it may die in the great and terrible daylight of the Lord. (P. T. Forsyth, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. |
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