Yet there is a point to be noted here which is common to human experience. Why should Solomon have married the daughter of Pharaoh? Why should he, in the first instance, have placed himself in so vital a relation to heathenism? Are there not men who first plunge into great mistakes, and then seek to rectify their position by zealous care about comparatively trifling details? Do not men make money by base means, and then most zealously betake themselves to bookkeeping, as if they would not spend money except in approved directions?
There is nothing more misleading than a conscience that does not rest on a basis of reason. We are to beware of the creation of a false conscience, or a partial conscience, or a conscience that operates only in given directions, but which makes up for sins of a larger kind by ostentatious devotion at the altar of detail and ceremony and petty ritual.
“Then Solomon offered burnt offerings unto the Lord on the altar of the Lord, which he had built before the porch, even after a certain rate every day, offering according to the commandment of Moses--on the Sabbaths, and on the new moons, and on the solemn feasts, three times in the year, even in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles.”
Solomon was great in burnt offerings. Do not men sometimes make up in burnt offerings what they lack in moral consistency? Is not an ostentatious religion the best proof of internal decay? It ought not to be so.
The hand and the heart should be one; the outward and the inward should correspond; the action should be the incarnation of the thought. We are not always to look on the ceremonial action of the Church as indicative of its real spirituality.
Solomon did not live to a very great age, since he was not more than twenty years old when he ascended the throne. Whether Solomon turned to the Lord again with all his heart--a question widely discussed by the older commentators--can not be ascertained from the Scriptures.
If the Preacher (Koheleth) is traceable to Solomon so far as the leading thoughts are concerned, we should find in this fact an evidence of his conversion, or at least a proof that at the close of his life Solomon discovered the vanity of all earthly possessions and aims, and even declared the fear of God to be the only abiding good with which a man can stand before the judgment of God.
The Temple of Solomon was, according to our ideas of size, a small building. It was less than one hundred and twenty feet long, and less than thirty-five feet broad; in other words, it was not so large as one of the ordinary parish churches of our own land. Much less did it approach to the size of the colossal buildings in Babylon or Egypt. But in Jewish eyes, at the time that it was built, it may have been “great”--that is to say, it may have exceeded the dimensions of any single separate building existing in Palestine up to the time of its erection. It may even have been larger than the buildings which the neighboring nations had erected to their respective gods.
Ancient worship was mainly in the open air, and the temples were viewed as shrines for the Deity and for His priests--not as buildings in which worshipers were to congregate. Hence their comparatively small size.
“And Solomon slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the city of David, his father; and Rehoboam, his son, reigned in his stead.”
This seems to be a lame and impotent conclusion. Yet it distinctly sets forth the common humanity of this most extraordinary and brilliant king. Literally, the passage means that Solomon lay down with his fathers. He might hardly be recognized from the humblest of them. The Sun dies at evening with scarcely a reminder of the glory which shone from him at mid-day.