THE MESSAGE OF ECCLESIASTES Τ' HE book of Ecclesiastes is the third and last of the wisdom books of the Old that of the book of Proverbs, which is epitomized in the words : "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, And He shall direct thy paths." In the last chapter and the closing verse of the book of Ecclesiastes, these words occur : "Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole of man." The word "duty" in our version is italicized, and we do well to omit it. It has no existence in the Hebrew text. The whole of man, then, is to "fear God, and keep His commandments." That expresses the same philosophy as that of Proverbs, though in different words. What then is the difference between these two books? In Proverbs wisdom is first defined, and then her voice is heard throughout. In Ecclesiastes we have something quite dif ferent. Wisdom is still essentially the same. In God it is His ultimate knowledge. In man, therefore, it is the result of right relationship to God. While in Proverbs the way of wisdom is described, in Ecclesiastes the results of disobedience are set forth. In this book we have the revelation of the experience of a man who failed to fear the Lord, and therefore lost the key to the ultimate knowledge and wisdom. In the study of this book we must be clear in our own mind as to the difference between the time when it was written, and the time when the writer passed through the experiences he describes. Ecclesiastes is not a diary. It is, as we saw when we studied its content, a sermon; that is, one set discourse. The text is first given; the introduction is in proper place; and then the main body of the discourse proceeds in regular sequence to mass the evidence to the truth of the proposition of the text. The attitude of the preacher must be understood, or we shall miss the value of the book. Through all his experiences he never lost his intellectual conviction of the existence of God. He was neither infidel nor agnostic. Unless a man profoundly believe in the existence of God, he will never say "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" when he is trying to live without God. There is a deadly satisfaction possible to a man if he can once rid himself of his belief in the existence of God. It is deadly because it is similar to the satisfaction resulting from the use of an opiate. All the restlessness of humanity is cause for thankfulness in that it reveals the underlying sense of God. All the sob and agony of Ecclesiastes is the outcome of the fact that the man whose experience it describes ever questioned the existence of God. Notwithstanding all this, the answering attitude of fear described in the book of Proverbs was absent. He believed in God, but lacked the fear which is the beginning of wisdom. He did not trust in Jehovah with all his heart. He did lean upon his own understanding. Believing in the existence of God, he did not in all his ways acknowledge Him, and consequently his paths lacked direction, and he wandered over trackless deserts in an agony of desire without satisfaction. The book of Ecclesiastes, therefore, is a mirror in which we see what life becomes when it is lived without submission to intellectual conviction. The permanent values of the book are two. The first is that of the revelation of the vanity of life unyielded to God; and the second is that of a brief statement of what true wisdom is. The revelation of the vanity of a godless life is sevenfold. In studying the preacher's account of his own experiences, we observe in him an oblique outlook upon the universe, a misconception of God, a religion of fear and fatalism, an attitude of cynical indifference, a narrow conception of life, a false earnestness and hopeless pessimism. He had an oblique outlook upon the universe This is the euphemistic method of expressing the truth. A friend of mine, discussing with me the brilliant articles which appeared in the Spectator in former days from the pen of Hutton, declared that while they still are full of fascination, as revelations of the times in which they were written, they are of no use to-day. When I asked him how he accounted for it, he bluntly replied, "Hutton squinted at everything." Not perfectly catching his meaning, he explained by saying that Hutton saw only one aspect of things, and, therefore, while his articles appealed to men who lived in the midst of the circumstances with which he dealt, at the distance of a quarter of a century they are valueless. The book of Ecclesiastes gives us the picture of the universe, which results from this kind of outlook. This man saw its machinery, but not its motive. He looked intently, and discovered things the scientific accuracy of which it has taken centuries to discover-such as the fact that the winds move in circuits; that rivers rising in the mountains flow to the sea and return again. When he declared that all was vanity, he was oppressed with the constant grind of the machinery of the universe, and that because he had no communion with the Master Spirit controlling the machinery, or, as we have said, had no consciousness of the motive. If one having no knowledge of machinery should be placed in the midst of the flying spindles and turning wheels of a Lancashire cotton mill, he would in all probability be oppressed by the monotonous movement; but if that machinery is understood from the standpoint of the counting-house where the masters of the movement are directing, in order to the completion of the fabric which is to serve the purposes of countless multitudes, he would discover the music of the machinery. The outlook of the |