XVII.

THE CONFESSIONS OF KING SOLOMON.

'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.'-ECCLES.

XII. 13.

O

NE who reads the Book of Ecclesiastes

carefully, must be struck, I believe, by the comparative absence of anything that would indicate that he was reading the confessions of a repentant Israelite. Acknowledgments of the vanity of all the works and sorrows of men, no less than of their delights and joys; the recognition of an eternal law of duty abiding for ever, while all things else change, or seem to change; warnings to the young to profit by the experience of one who has struggled out of the 'evil nets' into which they are rushing blindly, this we have abundantly. But this might come, we are tempted to say, from a heathen moralist. This is not the language of one who is conscious that he belongs to a peculiar people, who rests his hopes upon the covenant which God has made with his fathers. We look

for the belief in the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in one who was called to be the ruler of Israel, for some sign that the sure mercies of David were not forgotten by his son,—that he, the Preacher, remembered that he was the heir of the glorious and wonderful promises that were made to his father. We are compelled to confess that we can discover nothing of the kind. The sadness with which we read those confessions of a wasted life is mingled with wonder when we reflect that this was he whose youth must have been passed amid the minstrelsy of the Temple, and to whom the songs of the sweet Psalmist of Israel must have been familiar things. There is a strange contrast between the language of the father and the son. The shepherd-boy, whose early years were spent in hardship, and war, and danger; who had no certain dwelling-place, and encountered hunger and nakedness, and perils of water and of robbers-perils of his own countrymen, and of false brethren; who wandered as an outlaw in the wilderness of Judah, and sought refuge in dens and caves of the earth; to whom a crown brought nothing but a heavier burden and a deeper sorrow; whose old age was darker than his youth, and whose grey hairs were brought down with sorrow to the grave by the evil life and miserable death of the son whom he most loved ;-he never

lost, even for a moment, his trust in the perpetual loving presence of the God in whom he had believed. The Lord was still his shepherd, his shield and defence, his strong tower and his rock. Goodness and mercy,' he said, 'had followed him all the days of his life.' He felt sure that the same 'rod and staff' would be with him in the valley of the shadow of death.' The last utterance of his failing strength is full of the recollections of his youth, speaks of the same power of perceiving and enjoying the Divine beauty of nature, its wonderful loveliness or terror, as that of which the Psalms are full. The old man, whose life is fast passing away, feeble and cold and dying, has a vision of 'the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds, as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.' Whether this glory is to be realized in his own house and his own kingdom he knows not, yet he can depart in peace, believing that it is no deceitful dream, no mocking, transient brightness. There is an everlasting covenant; that is all his salvation and all his desire.'

What the life of the son was, how it led him to scepticism and scorn, we have in part already seen. The child of peace, the beloved of the Lord, living in security, triumphing almost without an effort over his rivals, crowned with all gifts of

1 2 Sam. xxiii. 4.

mind and spirit, living in the midst of a more than kingly magnificence, says nothing of the everlasting covenant, makes no acknowledgment of, utters hardly a prayer to, his Father in the heavens. The highest truths do not go beyond the recognition that there is, in spite of all appearances that contradict it, a righteous and Divine order, or the belief that it is the duty of men to 'fear God and keep His commandments.'

6

It seems almost a truism to infer from this contrast the blessedness of a life of trial and suffering, the danger of one of unbroken prosperity and ease. And yet here, as in so many other instances, a truism is only a disregarded truth, one which does not cease to be true, but which we do not choose to acknowledge as we ought to do. This is the great lesson of all experience. It is good for men that they should be afflicted,' for thus they learn the statutes of God.'1 It is because this is the tendency of suffering, that it comes so largely into the discipline by which the children of God are perfected, so that 'whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.'2 There are no times so likely to lead men to trust in the Everlasting Arms as those in which the arm of flesh fails them utterly; none in which they can learn so truly that their strength is in quietness

and confidence,' as those in which they find that the reed on which they have leant has broken beneath their hand, and pierced it. And we, who live in easy circumstances, and to whom, in the common course of things, our daily life brings no hardships or dangers, have great need to remember how very close an utter godlessness may lie to that outward regularity. If we set our hearts on

the treasures of earth, or its joys, or put our trust in princes, or in any child of men, we shall discover, sooner or later, that these idols of our souls come between us and God. Our perceptions of the truths which we profess will become ever fainter and dimmer. What wonder, if our lives are so utterly unlike what Christ's life was, that we should cease to understand His gospel, and have therefore but a formal and shallow belief in it?

But the history of the Preacher has a more definite and a deeper meaning in it. It shows us that the special tendency of the life which he had led, a life, be it remembered, of intellectual activity, as well as one full of the pride of life and the pleasures of gratified desires, is to tear up by the roots a man's hereditary faith, and all the hope and confidence that are bound up with it. Those hopes, the clear, undoubting trust, the unclouded apprehension of the truths which he has been taught in childhood, are treasures which it is easy