ticle ; and our author elsewhere asserts positively his belief in the doctrine of immortality (ch. xii, 7). How it happens that he did not give to this doctrine a ]irc- vailing influence upon his mode of treating his subject has lately been investigated by Heyder, in his essay entitled Eccksiaske de Immortalitate Animi Senieiitim (Erlangen, 1838)." (See Dr. Nordheimer, on 77*6 Phi- losophy of Ecclesiastei, in the Amer. Bib. Ecjws. Juh*, 1838.) — Kitto, s. v. ; Smith, s. v. ; Fairbairn, s. v.
IV. Plan and Cijnknfs. — The book of Ecclcsiastes comes before us as being conspicuously, among the writings of the O. T., the great stumbling-block of commentators. Elsewhere there are different opin- ions as to the meaning of different passages. Here there is the widest possible divergence as to the plan and purpose of the whole book. The passages already quoted from the INIishna show that some, at least, of tlie Rabbinical writers were perplexed by its teaching — did not know what to make of it — but gave way to the authorit}' of men more discerning than themselves. The traditional statement, however, that this was among the Scriptures which were not read by any one under the age f)f thirty {Crit. Sac. Amama in JEccles., but with a "nescio ubi" as to his authority), indicates the continuance of the old difficulty, and the remarks of Jerome (^Pr:rf. in Eccles., Comm. in Eccles. xii, 13) show that it was not forgotten. Little can be gather- ed from the series of Patristic interpreters. The book is comparatively seldom quoted by them. No attempt is made to master its plan and to enter into the spirit of its writer. The charge brought by Philastrius of Brescia (circ. A.D. 380) against some heretics who re- jected it as teaching a false morality, shows that the obscurity which had been a stumbling-block to Jewish teachers was not removed for Christians. The fact that Theodore of ]Mopsuestia was accused at the fifth general council of calling in question the authority and inspiration of this book, as well as of the Canticles, indicates that in this respect, as in others, he was the precursor of tlic spirit of modern criticism. But, with these exceptions, there are no traces that men's minds were drawn to examine the teachings of this book. When, however, we descend to the more recent devel- opments of criticism, we meet with an almost incredi- ble divergence of opinion. Luther, with his broad, clear insight into the workings of a man's heart, sees in it {Pnef. in Ecchs.) a noble " Politica vel Q^^cono- mica," leading men in the midst of all the troul)lcs and disorders of human society to a true endurance and reasonable enjoyment. Grotius (^Pyrcf. in Eccles.) gives up the attempt to trace in it a plan or order of thought, and finds in it only a collection of many maxims, connected more or less closely with the great problems of human life, analogous to the discussion of the ditlerent definitions of happiness at the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics. Some (of whom Warburton may be t;iken as the^type, Works, iv, 154) have seen in the language of ii, 18-21, a proof that the l)elief in the immortality of the soul was no part of the transmitted creed of Israel. Others (Patrick, Des Yceux, David- son, Mendelssohn) contend that the special purpose of the book was to assert tiiat truth against the denial of a sensual scepticism. Others, the later Germnn critics, of whom Ewald may be taken as the highest and best type, reject these views as partial and one- sided; and, while admitting that the book contains the germs of later systems, both Pharisaic and Sadducas- an, assert that the object of the writer was to point out the secret of a true filessedness, in the midst of all the distractions and sorrows of the world, as consisting in a tranquil, calm enjoj'ment of the good that comes from God (Poet. Biich. iv, 180).
The variety of tiiese opinions indicates sufficientlj' that the Ijook is as far removed as possilile from the character of a formal treatise. It is simply wnat it professes to be — tlie confession of a man of wide experi- ence looking back iipon his past life, and looking cut
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upon the disorders and calamities which surround him. Such a man does not set forth his premises and conclu- sions with a logical completeness. While it may be true that the absence of a formal arrangement is char- acteristic of the Hebrew mind in all stages of its de- velojinient (Lowth, Be Sac. Poet. Jleh. Pi eel. xxiv), or that it was the special mark of the declining literature of the period tiiat followed the captivity (Ewald, Poet. Buch. iv, 177), it is also true that it belongs gcneral- iv to all writings that are addressed to the spiritual rather than the intellectual element in man's nature, and that it is found accordingly in many of the great- est works tliat have influenced the spiritual life of mankind. In proportion as a man has passed out of the region of traditional, easilj'-systematized knowl- edge, and has lived under the influence of great thoughts — possessed by them, yet hardl}' mastering them so as to bring them under a scientific classifica- tion— are we likely to find this apparent want of meth- od. The true utterances of such a man are the rec- ords of his struggles after truth, of his occasional glimpses of it, of his ultimate discover}^ The treatise l)e Imitatione Ckn'sii, the Pensees of Pascal, Augus- tine's Copfem<ms,\\i(^ii\y as they differ in other points, have this feature in common. If the writer conscious- ly reproduces the stages through which he has passed, the form he adopts may either Ije essentialh- dramatic, or it maj' record a statement of the changes which have brought him to his present state, or it may repeat and renew the oscillations from one extreme to anoth- er which had marked that earlier experience. The writer of Ecclesiastes has adopted and interwoven both the latter methods, and hence, in part, the obscurity which has made it so pre-eminently the stumbling- block of commentators. He is not a didactic moralist writing a homily on virtue. He is not a prophet de- livering a nitssage from the Lord of Hosts to a sinful people. He is a man who has sinned in giving waj' to selfishness and sensuality, who has paid the penalty of that sin in satiety and weariness of life ; in whom the mood of spirit, over-reflective, indisposed to action, of which Shakspeare has given us in Hamlet, Ja(iues, Kichard II, three distinct examples, has become dom- inant in its darkest form, but who has through all this been under the discipline of a divine education, and has learnt from it the lesson which God meant to teach him. What that lesson was will be seen from an ex- amination of the l)ook itself.