II. CHARACTER OF SOLOMON.
Solomon's writings and history both show that he was a libertine, a tyrant, and a polygamist. His tyrannical monopoly-of seven hundred wives and three hundred prostitutes, making him a practica "Free-lover" on a large scale, is an indelible stigma upon his character. It was a usurpation of the rights, and a trespass upon the liberties, of nearly two thousand men and women. It prevented them from filling the mission or sphere in life that God designed them to enjoy. The organization of the sexes shows they were designed to be husbands and wives and parents. And the nearly equal number of the sexes is an evidence that nearly a thousand men were deprived of wives by Solomon's monopoly of women; while, on the other hand, those women were prevented from sustaining the true relation of wives. When he could not see those women more than once in three years by calling on one of them each day, it is a farce, and an insult to reason, to call them wives. Could a woman sustain the practical relation of wife to a man she only saw as husband once in three years? The very idea is ridiculous, and a mockery of the true marriage relation. And yet this is the man who is represented as being such a special favorite of God as to receive a portion of his divine wisdom. It is a slander, if any thing can be, upon Infinite Wisdom. By reading his amorous song, we can learn his motives for enslaving such a large number of women.
If this "wise man" is to be accepted as authority (and he should be if he got his wisdom directly from God), then we must relinquish all hope of an immortal existence. Hear him: "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts:... as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast" (Eccles. iii. 19). Here is a plain and unequivocal denial of man's conscious existence beyond the grave. Nor does the Old-Testament writer teach the doctrine. Job denies it in still more explicit terms, if possible. (See Job xiv. 10.)