Old Groans and New Songs / Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes

by Frederick Charles Jennings

Now may the Lord grant us to realize more fully, as we progress in our book, the awful hopelessness that weighs on man's sad being, apart from the blessed and infinitely gracious revelation of God.

CHAPTER VI.

Remembering how far the writer of our book excels all who have ever come after him, in ability, wisdom, or riches, his groans of disappointment shall have their true weight with us, and act as lighthouse beacons, warning us from danger, or from spending the one short fleeting life we have in treading the same profitless pathway of groaning.

So chapter six opens, still on the same subject of wealth and its power to bless. A sore evil, and one that weighs heavily on man, has Solomon seen: riches, wealth, and honor, clustering thick on the head of one person, and yet God has withheld from him the power of enjoying it all. As our own poet, Browning, writes that apt illustration of King Saul:

"A people is thine,
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine!
High ambition, and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them all,
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature—King Saul."

So sorrowful is this in our preacher's eyes, and so thoroughly does it bespeak a state of affairs under the sun in confusion, that Solomon ventures the strongest possible assertion. Better, he says, an untimely birth, that never saw light, than a thousand years twice told, thus spent in vanity, without real good having been found. How bitter life must show itself to lead to such an estimate! Better never to have been born than pass through life without finding something that can satisfy. But this is not looking at life simply in itself, for life in itself is good, as the same poet sings:

"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water!
How good is man's life—the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

It is because man has, of all the creation of God, an awful shadow hanging over him—"death and darkness and the tomb," with the solemn, silent, unknown "beyond" lying before him, robbing him of rest. Angels have present pure delight, with no such shadow possible—they die not. The beast may enjoy his pasture, for no thought of a coming death disturbs him. Life may be full of a kind of enjoyment to such; but man, poor man, when awake to the possibilities of his own being, as it surely becomes man to be (and that is just the point of this book—we are not looking upon man as a mere animal, but as a reasoning creature, and as such he), is robbed of present rest and enjoyment by an inevitable fate to which he is hastening, and from which there is no possible escape. Do not all go to one place?—that vague "Sheol," speaking of the grave, and yet the grave, not as the end, but an indefinite shadowy existence beyond? All, all go there; and with no light on that, better, indeed, "the untimely birth which came in vanity and departs in darkness;" for this, at least, has the more rest. Bitter groan this, indeed!

For the Preacher continues: "Does man's labor satisfy him? Can he get what is really 'good' from it?" No. For never is his appetite filled so that it desires nothing more. The constant return of its thirst demands constant toil; and fool and wise must alike obey its call. This is not confined to bodily food, but covers that bitter hunger and thirst of the heart, as the use of the word soul (margin) shows. The longings of the wise may be for a higher food. He may aim above the mere sensual, and seek to fill his soul with the refined, but he fails, as indeed do all, even "the poor man who knows to walk before the living;" that is, even the poor man who, with all the disadvantages of poverty, has wisdom enough to know how to live so as to command the respect of his fellows. Wise indeed must such be; but he, no more than the fool, has found the "good" that forever satisfies hunger and thirst, and calms to rest the wandering of the soul, which, like the restless swallow, is ever on the wing. Man is made up of desire, and one glimpse with the eyes, something seen, is at least something secured, and it is better than all mere longing, which is vanity and the pursuit of the wind. For everything has long ago been named from its own nature; and in this way its name shows what it is. Thus man, too, (Adam,) is, and ever has been, known from his name, from "adamah," earth; his name so showing his mortality. If thus he has been made by his Creator, how vain for him to hope to escape his fate, for with Him no contention is possible. What use, then, in many words (not things) since they afford no relief as against that end? they only increase vanity. Then the last sad wail of this subject: "Who knoweth what is really good—satisfying for man—during the few fleeting years of his vain life here, which he passes as a shadow; and when he is gone, who can tell him what shall be after him under the sun"?