The Pulpit Commentary — Ecclesiastes — Section 43

Vers.1-11.-The summary of a life's ezperience. "Solomon and Job,"says Pascal, "bad most perfect knowledge of human wretchedness, and have given us the most complete description of it : the one was the most prosperous, the other the most unfortunate, of men; the one knew by experience the vanity of pleasure, the other the reality of sorrow." In such diverse ways does God lead men to the same conclusion- that in human life, apart from him, there is no true satisfaction or lasting happiness, that the immortal spirit cannot find rest in things seen and temporal. The words, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity: what profit hath man of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the sun?" (Revised Version), are the key-note of the whole book-the theme which the author maintains by arguments and illustrations drawn from a most varied experience. If Solomon be not the speaker, if we ha.vein Ecclesiastes the com- position of a later writer, no more appropriate personage could have been found than the ancient Jewish king to set forth the teaching which the book contains. For he had tasted a.11 the good things human life has to give. On him God had bestowed wisdom and knowledge, riches, wealth, honour, and length of days. .All these he had enjoyed to the full, and therefore speaks, or is made to speak, a.s one from whom nothing bad been kept that his soul desired, and who found that nothing results from the mere satisfaction of appetites and desires but satiety and loathing and disappointment, We may contrast with this retrospect of life that given us by One whose aim it was to fulfil the Law of God and secure the well-being of his fellow-men; and we may thus discover the secret of Solomon's failure to win happiness or to reach any lasting result. .At the close of his life the Redeemer of mankind summed up the history of his career in the words addressed to God, " I glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do" (John xvii. 4). It may seem to some a dreary task to follow the course of Solomon's morbid thoughts, but it cannot fail to be profitable, if we undertake the task in the earnest desire to discover the causes of his melancholy and disappointment, and learn from the study how to guide our own lives more success- fully, and to enter into the peace and contentment of spirit which, after all bis efforts, he failed to make his own. In the first eleven verses of this chapter we have revealed to us the despair and weariness which fell upon the soul of him whose splendour and wisdom raised him above all the men of his time, and made him the wonder of all succeedinu aues. Life seemed to him the empliest and poorest thing possible-" a vapour th~t ippeareth for a liltle time, and then vanisheth away." He might have used the words of the modern philosopher Amie!, "To appear and to vanish,-there is the biography of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe; and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyphic traced for an instant in the sand and effaced a moment afterwards by a breath of wind, 11n air-bubble ex11andi,ng and vanishing on the surface of the great ri\·er of being-an appearance, a C!II. I, i-18.j ECdLEStAS'l'ES; OR, 'l'HE .PitEA(;HER. 25