Living for the Best

by James G. K. McClure

Solomon had other kinds of wisdom. How they came to him we do not know. Perhaps he was born with a large degree of mother wit and with a very strong mental grasp. Perhaps his father, himself a thoughtful man and a brilliant writer, provided the best teachers that wealth could procure for his son. Perhaps his mother, who had eager ambition for her son, constantly urged him on to large intellectual development.

Explain his case as we may, the facts are that he had scientific wisdom. He knew nature so well that careful writers have even called him "the father of natural science." He knew trees, from the lordly cedar-tree that graced Lebanon to the little hyssop that springs out from between the stones of a wall, as I once saw it in an old well near Jerusalem. He knew beasts of the field, fowls of the air, animals that creep on the ground, and fishes that swim in the water. Such is the brief résumé by the Scriptures of his acquaintance with nature. The legends of the East add that he could interpret the speech of beasts and birds, that he understood the hidden virtues of herbs, and that he was familiar with the secret forces of nature.

He had also literary wisdom. He was a beautiful, trained, and forceful writer. The seventy-second Psalm, beginning "Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son," is ascribed to him. So is the one hundred and twenty-seventh Psalm, opening with the words, "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Much of the book of Proverbs is written by him or compiled by him—a book whose concise, striking, intelligent, helpful utterances are a monument of literary skill. Ecclesiastes, with its philosophical dissertations on the fleeting and disappointing elements of human life, is also assigned to him. So is the Song of Solomon, which breathes a wealth of poetical fervor, that understood and applied spiritually, is as sweet as the voice of the meadow lark soaring skyward in the light and beauty of a summer day. Yet these writings are only a part of what he produced. His songs were a thousand and five, his proverbs not less than three thousand. What we have in the Bible simply suggests the variety and power of his literary style, the force and sagacity of his sound sense, the brilliancy and fitness of his practical wisdom. Solomon's words are such that to this day, in this land, and in every land of the earth, they are competent to teach prudence, economy, reverence for parents, self-protection, purity, honesty, and faithfulness to duty. The boy that learns them and carries them with him as a vital principle of being and of conduct will move unsoiled and unhurt wherever he may go. The home that places them at its center and reveres them will be cheerful and brave. The grown man that carries them with him into every detail of business and care will be upright and beautiful.

The wisdom of Solomon was commercial as well as scientific and literary. He recognized the advantages of trade. He extended it. He sent ships so far away to the east that passing through the Red Sea out into the Indian Ocean they brought back the treasures of Arabia and India and Ceylon—gold and silver and precious stones; nard, aloes, sandalwood, and ivory; apes and peacocks. He sent other ships along the Mediterranean coasts to the north, where Hiram, king of Tyre, lived, and then to the west, out between the gates of Hercules, past the present Gibraltar, up the Atlantic Ocean to the north until they touched at southern England, at Cornwall, where they found the tin which, combined with copper, formed the bronze for armor and for all so-called "brazen" furniture. Not alone through ships of the sea did he seek out the best treasures of all the accessible earth and beautify Jerusalem with them, but also through ships of the desert—camels—did he do the same. He caused the great caravan routes of the day to pass through Jerusalem, and he levied duties on the objects transported from Damascus on the north to Memphis on the south, and from Tadmor in the east to Asia Minor in the west. He put himself into contact with all the thought and purposes of other nations than his own, he learned what their kings and queens, their merchants, their sailors, their writers, were saying and doing, and thus he brought home to his mind the leading ideas of his time. His knowledge of men, of methods, and of enterprise became vast.

Nor did his wisdom stop with commerce; it included government also, and was political. He took the throne at a time when government was weak, or almost disorganized. David's last years were years of physical disability, wherein he could not curb the rebellious spirits that were gaining influence in many quarters. Solomon, upon his assumption of rule, judiciously subdued all rebellion of every kind, united the entire kingdom, and started that kingdom upon the period of its greatest glory. He made treaties that bound adjacent principalities to him and caused them to pay tribute. He held such power that nations did not care to fight with him, and so he became a king of peace. He laid taxes on his own people that brought in large revenue. It was indeed the golden period of Israel.

The effect of Solomon's wisdom was great and extensive. His reputation went far and wide. People made long journeys to see him, ask him questions, and honor him. Even one like the Queen of Sheba came with a great retinue, up through the desert, past village and town, to bring him costly gifts and talk with the man who knew so much. His influence became pervasive. It entered into the legends of people who never saw him, and became so fixed a part of those legends, that those legends, repeated until to-day, still sound his praise. He was known in tent and in palace as the wisest man that had ever lived, and the most exaggerated statements were made and received of his insight into the mysteries of the spirit world and his power to control the supposed spirit forces of the air. His wealth became almost incredible. Nothing like it has ever been known—not in the time of the Roman emperors, nor in the time of to-day. The fabulous magnificence of Mexican and Peruvian kings helps us to realize Solomon's glory. "The walls, the doors, the very floor of the temple, were plated with gold, furnishing gorgeous imagery for John's description of heaven." Two hundred targets and three hundred shields of beaten gold were held by the guard through whose lines Solomon passed to the temple or to his house of the forest. His throne of ivory, as were its steps, was overlaid with plates of gold. All his drinking-vessels were of gold, and all the vessels of the house of the forest were of pure gold, none were of silver. He was able to make the temple the costliest structure for its size the world has ever seen. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into its erection and decoration. When to-day the traveler visits Baalbec and sees stones over seventy feet in length and fourteen in width and in depth—stones quarried, conveyed, raised up into high walls and securely masoned there; when to-day the traveler sees the golden jewelry gathered from ancient Grecian graves and placed on exhibition in Athens; and when to-day the traveler examines the massive work done in Egypt, whose ruins are overpowering in their grandeur, and seeing these stones, jewelry, and structures remembers that Solomon knew all the skill, wealth, and buildings of the whole Mediterranean world, then he can understand how Solomon, with his resources, built a city like Palmyra, and a house of worship like the temple, and made silver to be as stones in Jerusalem.

Ah, if this Solomon, so brilliant and so powerful, so "glorious," as Christ called him, could only have preserved the best wisdom all through his years, whose name—except Christ's—would be comparable to his!

He asked God for the wisdom that discerns between the good and the evil. God answered that prayer and gave him such wisdom. How clearly he saw at the first! If two women came to him, each claiming to be the mother of a little child, and asking for the child's possession, how skilful he was in ordering that the child be cut in twain in their presence, thus causing the true mother to cry out in love for her child and then giving her the child unhurt. The traditions of the east—some of them perhaps once a part of those lost books mentioned in the Bible, The Book of the Acts of Solomon, The Book of Nathan the Prophet, The Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, The Visions of Iddo the Seer, tell again and again how quiet and accurate Solomon's perception was in distinguishing real flowers from artificial, in distinguishing girls from boys though dressed alike, and in deciding case after case of legal perplexity. He did have a discerning heart when, in his early days, he knew who his enemies were and he crushed them, who his true counselors were and he listened to them, what his supreme duty was and he built God's house, what his sinful heart needed and he shed the blood of atonement for it. It was discernment when, though he made his own house rich, he made God's house richer; when he counted his gift of millions of dollars to God's honor a delight; and when he would let neither knowledge nor pleasure nor pomp nor glory withdraw his supreme affection from God.

Would that he had always continued as he was! Would that he had remembered that the prayer offered to-day for a blessing in character must be offered again to-morrow if that blessing in character is to be retained! Prayer is not so much a momentary wish as a continuous spirit. His momentary wish and the resolve that sprang from it were at the time all that God or man could desire. A mind distrustful of its own omniscience, humbly waiting on God for discernment, is the wisest of all minds. That mind was once in Solomon, but not always. When grown to maturity he talked philosophy, still he was wise. But when he came to act upon his philosophy, he was unwise. He failed to discern between the value and the curse of wealth. He became a lover of money for money's sake. He laid taxes on the people that they could not endure. He treated them no longer as a father, but as a master. He ceased to distinguish between the beauty and the disease of luxury. He built gardens and palaces, and made displays, not with the thought of any praise they would be to Jehovah, or to the establishment of God's people on a sound financial and political basis, but for the honor and recognition that would come to him. He became a captive to the love of magnificence and to the desire for display. He made marriages that were matters of state expediency and were not matters of heart conviction, and thus put himself under the influence of those whose religious purposes were wholly opposed to his own. He filled his palaces with women whose presence indeed was a great indication of Oriental affluence, but whose presence was a menace to clear vision of integrity, and was a woeful example to the nation. He grew blinder and blinder to fine perceptions, not alone of what was good in taste, but of what was right in principle. He became so broad in his religious sympathies that he seemed to forget that there can be but one living and true God. He even went after "Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcar, the abomination of the Amonites." And as a last blind act of folly, he even raised within sight of God's holy temple "an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Moloch, the abomination of the children of Ammon, in the hill that is before Jerusalem." What men like Daniel would not do, what men like Shadrach would not do, what martyrs in after days, asked to say the simple word "Cæsar" and throw a grain of corn on an heathen altar, would not do, though death awaited them, Solomon did. He gave up the fine distinction between the true and the untrue, between God and idolatry, between divine principle and human expediency. And with this loss of the best wisdom came loss of manliness, loss of peace, and loss of the favor of God. Wealth, power, luxury, praise, glory, were still about him, but he had made the most serious of all serious mistakes. Later he recognized his mistake. We hope that he repented, genuinely repented, of his mistake, and before his death turned back to God and the best wisdom. But whether he died repentant or unrepentant Solomon is the man who is forever the example of unparalleled wisdom and of ruinous folly—of ruinous folly because his wisdom failed to retain the element of the discerning mind.

Here, then, is a lesson: "With all thy getting, get understanding." Life is not a best success, whatever else it may have in it, unless it draws fine lines of separation between good and evil. The wealth and learning and glory of the wide world cannot make up for a lack of sensitive conscientiousness. The study and ambition of life must be applied to the securing and retaining of fine powers of moral discrimination if we are to be truly wise. Every one can have this discerning mind, at least to such a degree as shall enable him to avoid the fearful mistake of palliating evil and of becoming enslaved to evil. A little child may in this respect be wiser than the oldest man; the simple peasant may be safer than the most cultured scholar. Not even libraries of knowledge can save the character of the man whose vision of good and evil is blunted.