Ecclesiastes 1

1. THE words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; 3 vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath man of all his labour wherein he 4 laboureth under the sun? One generation goeth, and another generation cometh; and 5 the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hast- 6 eth to his place where he ariseth. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it turneth about continually in its course, and the wind returneth again 7 to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again. 8 All things are full of weariness; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, 9 nor the ear filled with hearing. That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the 10 sun. Is there a thing whereof men say, See this is new? it hath been already, in the ages 11 which were before us. There is no remembrance of the former generations; neither shall there be any remembrance of the latter generations that are to come, among those that shall come after.

12. I the Preacher was king over Israel in 13 Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven: it is a sore travail that God hath given to the sons of men 14 to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after 15 wind. That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting 16 cannot be numbered. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I have gotten me great wisdom above all that were before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. 17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also was a striving after 18 wind. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

1. In this, its title, the book clearly purports to be the production of Solomon. King is in apposition with Preacher, and not with David; and as Solomon was the only son of David who was king in Jerusalem, he must be meant. J. M. M.

2. God raised up Solomon. He made him healthy and handsome—wise and brilliant. He poured wealth into his lap, till it ran over; He made him absolute monarch of the finest kingdom which the world at that time offered; and He put into his hand a peaceful sceptre, and saved him from the hardships of the field and the perils of the fight. Thus endowed and favored, Solomon commenced the search after happiness. Everything except godly, he devoted himself to the art of enjoyment. And in carrying on his own experiment he unwittingly but effectually became God’s demonstration. Into the crucible he cast rank and beauty, wealth and learning; and, as a flux, he added youth and genius; and then, with all the ardor of his vehement nature, he urged the furnace to its whitest glow. But when the grand projection took place, from all the costly ingredients the entire residuum was, Vanity of vanities! Hamilton.

The number of things which he specifically presents to our view as vanities is not indeed very great. He evidently designs those which he presents to be regarded as specimens of all the rest. But the objects presented are shown in various aspects and relations. He has, indeed, repeatedly brought several topics before us; but he places them each time in a different attitude and in new relations; and it soon becomes evident that he has insisted on them so frequently only because of their relative importance to his main object. M. S.

3. What profit hath a man. The question is, as in the analogous one of Matt. 16:26, the most emphatic form of a negation. The word for “profit” occurs only in this book. Its strict meaning is “that which remains,” the surplus, if any, of the balance-sheet of life. The question is in substance, almost in form, identical with that of our times, “Is life worth living?” E. H. P.

The question stated in this verse is substantially the same as is referred to in chaps. 2:3,

22; 3:9; 5:16; 6:11, etc.; it is the great practical inquiry of the book, and receives its final answer in chap. 12:13, 14. When this question was asked (Rupert of Deutz observes) the Lord had not yet said, “Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Profit. This word occurs with remarkable frequency in Ecclesiastes, and always in the sense of profit, or pre-eminence. It is therefore opposed to vanity. Its derivation is from a word signifying to hang over, overflow, abound, remain over and above. W. T. B.

What profit has a man of all the pains he takes? Observe that the business of this world is described as labor; the word signifies both care and toil; it is work that wearies men; it is labor under the sun, a phrase peculiar to this book, where we meet with it twenty-eight times. There is a world above the sun, a world which needs not the sun, for the glory of God is its light, where there is work without labor and with great profit, the work of angels; but he speaks of the work under the sun, the pains of which are great and the gains little. H.—Solomon’s inquiry then is equivalent to the question, What profit hath a man of all his labors for this life? In other words, his inquiry is, What advantage is there in this life irrespective of another? What advantage has life without another life? And by degrees, as will appear, he prepares the mind of his auditors for the great announcement, there is a future reward! Y.

4-7. Ceaseless toil, in one perpetual round with no real progress; so man lives and labors and gets no resulting good. This seems to be the central thought in these several illustrations. Human generations come and go; the earth on which they dwell abides unchanged. The sun rises and sets each day, and according to the ancient modes of expression, hastens by some unknown path from his setting place to his rising, to come forth again “like a strong man to run a race.” The winds blow toward the south; then return toward the north, sweeping round their ever-varying circuits; and just so the waters are in ceaseless motion, flowing in rivers to the sea, but never filling it; for evaporation lifts those waters again into the atmosphere, where they form clouds which pour the same waters again upon the earth—filling the springs, swelling the rivers, which again run into the great deep sea. So the order of nature gives us perpetual revolution, which in one aspect of it is labor without progress. It is in this special aspect that Solomon compares these features in the course of nature with the course of human life. It is indeed a sombre view of human life, as it is also of the course of nature; but, as to the masses of men in every age of the world yet, not more sombre than true. For what has been the product of substantial good from the toilsome lives of the myriads who have been born, have lived, and have died in the lapse of the thousands of human generations since the world began? What have they done to bless each other and to make the world better, and thereby to gain for themselves the solid pleasures of a useful life? Obviously Solomon is thinking only of the never-ceasing routine of human toil, selfishly designed and selfishly applied; and to get from nature the symbol of this he must think of the ceaseless march of human generations from the cradle to the grave with no progress in human well-being, of the naked fact of everlasting sameness in the revolutions of the sun and the winds and the waters of our globe. H. C.

4. Generation passeth and generation cometh. If there is no future, the coming and going of generation after generation is of little consequence. There is no result worthy of the great Author of all things. Man is less important than the earth on which he lives so short a time. He comes and goes, “but the earth abideth.” If man’s labor terminates on earthly things, and he perishes when he dies, then the true order is reversed; man is not immortal, while the earth is immortal. The earth is the abiding stage, while human life is a coming on and going off—a mere passing scene soon to terminate without any important result. “What profit?” Y.

There is no phenomenon of human life mere solemn than its succession of generations. “One generation passeth away, another generation cometh.” And, as if to put this in a light as affecting and indelible as possible, the writer immediately adds, “the earth abideth forever.” A thought that gleams like a lightning flash across this panorama of life, burning it into the beholder’s brain forever. Even the rude, gross, material earth, which we were created to subdue, and upon which we so proudly tread, is represented as having to the palpable sense this advantage over us. The abiding earth constitutes a little eternity, compared with the duration of its changing inhabitants. We come into it and pass over it, obliterating, perhaps, some footprints in its dust by the impress of our own, to be in their turn effaced, and then leave it with amazing rapidity, as a hireling man accomplishes his days. H. Allon.

Think sometimes when you traverse the city how many entire generations have walked along some of those streets; or look over it from one of the neighboring eminences, and think of the difference between the scene of all its busy crowd, and of that mightier multitude of which not one being now mingles with that crowd! But the hill is the same, the general landscape the same—“the earth abideth forever!” And now we tread this same ground, or fix our eyes on the same objects; we, too, shall disappear, but they will still be there. J. F.

6. The Bible frequently makes allusions to the laws of nature, their operations and effects. But such allusions are often so wrapped in the folds of the peculiar and graceful drapery with which its language is occasionally clothed, that the meaning, though peeping out from its thin covering all the while, yet lies in some sense concealed until the lights and revelations of science are thrown upon it; then it bursts out and strikes us with exquisite force and beauty. Maury.—Maury has vividly described the currents in the atmosphere from the equator to the poles, and from the poles to the equator—the one current ranging along a lower level, the other on a higher, and both exchanging their heights at the equator and the tropics, like overlapping belts on higher and lower wheels in a factory, while at the north and south poles they move from right to left and left to right respectively, around a circular mass of air, and are steady in their course as the Gulf Stream. Unlike the trade winds, they know no rest. Their circuit is ceaseless; and no one can examine the facts which have been ascertained and the principles which they represent, without delighting in the new meaning which lights up this Scripture sentence. W. Fraser.—In this single verse Solomon describes the circulation of the atmosphere as actual observation is now showing it to be. That it has its laws, and is obedient to order as the heavenly host in their movement, we infer from the fact announced in the next verse, which contains the essence of volumes by other men. Maury.

7. Can any history of rivers be more definite and succinct than that which is given here, when they are represented as hasting to the sea from the hills and the clouds, and as again returning to renew their course? W. Fraser.—Motion is the law of the universe. Work is the law of the Christian life. God bestows His gifts not that they may be kept, but diffused. If we keep them, and are full, where is the room for more, which God is so anxious to bestow? What would the sea gain by refusing to part with its vapors? It could not be fuller, and its waters would become stagnant, but now they are ever being lifted heavenward and purified, to be returned again in showers that fill the streams which pour their freshness and abundance back again into the sea. The whole universe is in motion; nothing is made merely for rest; everything is shining, flowing, ripening, yielding, sustaining, beautifying, cheering, comforting, or something of the kind. We fail to discern the final cause of our creation if we live unto ourselves. If grace has renewed our souls, then must grace have its fruit, or heaven’s highest purpose in our salvation is defeated. We must never pause. “Work here, rest in heaven.” The more we receive, the more let us do. There is no danger in receiving ever so much, in being ever so rich, ever so wise, ever so distinguished, if as we attain these we employ them for God and humanity. Only so can a life that the world calls prosperous be a life really blessed. Northwestern Christian Advocate.

8. It is not any quantity of knowledge, how great soever, that can make the mind of man to swell; for nothing can fill, much less extend, the soul of man, but God and the contemplation of God; and therefore Solomon, speaking of the two principal senses of inquisition, the eye and the ear, affirmeth that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing; and if there be no fulness, then is the continent greater than the content. Bacon.—You may as soon fill a bag with wisdom or a chest with virtue as the heart of man with anything here below. A man may have enough of the world to sink him, but he can never have enough to satisfy him. T. Brooks.

9. There are no novelties, no wonders, no discoveries. This universe does not yield an eye-full, an ear-full, to its occupant. The present only repeats the past, the future will repeat them both. The inventions of to-day are the forgotten arts of yesterday, and our children will forget our wisdom only to have the pleasure of fishing up, as new prodigies, our obsolete truisms. There is no new thing under the sun, yet no repose. Perpetual functions and transient objects—permanent combinations, yet shifting atoms, sameness, yet incessant change, make up the monotonous medley. Hamilton—Ancient histories, and monuments older than history, disclose to us that there were, two, three, and four thousand years ago, nations scarcely less advanced in material civilization and in the arts of social life than ourselves, and who certainly possessed arts that we do not, and were able to execute works which we cannot surpass, and some that we cannot equal, sufficient to counterbalance our possession of arts which they had not acquired, and our execution of works they had not imagined. It has been proved that many, and it may prove that more of our inventions and improvements are but revivals of old things. This was felt twenty-seven centuries ago by one who knew the primeval history as well as we do, if not better; and there is deep truth in the words of the Preacher, “The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.” Kitto.

10. In the kingdom of Providence, though the course and method of it have not such known and certain rules as that of nature, nor does it go always in the same track, yet in the general it is still the same thing over and over again; men’s hearts are still the same; their desires, pursuits, and complaints still the same; and what God does in His dealings with men is according to the Scripture, according to the manner, so that it is all repetition. What is surprising to us need not be so, for there has been the like; the like strange advancements and disappointments; the like strange revolutions and sudden turns of affairs; the miseries of human life have always been much the same, and mankind tread a perpetual round, and as the sun and wind are but where they were. H. —11. What then comes of human toil? All human glory perishes. Life is but a treadmill process, with no resulting good that endures and pays him for his labor. This is the outcome of every pleasure-seeking life. H. C.

12. Hitherto we have heard Wisdom, in highly poetic language, declaring generally the vanity of all things. Now, Solomon begins in less rhythmical language to relate his personal experience, which is continued to the end of the second chapter. Beginning with the time of his accession to the throne, when the gifts of wisdom and riches were specially promised to him, he relates the anxious efforts which he made, with his unprecedented resources, to advance wisdom, pleasure, grandeur, and every personal gratification, and how the result of his experience was “no profit,” and a conviction that all, even God’s gifts of earthly good to good men, in this life are subject to vanity. His trial of his first gift, wisdom, is recounted in vs. 12-18

I was king. It is alleged that this expression implies that at the time when these words were written Solomon was no longer king, and that consequently the passage must have been written by some one personating him after his death. But, whatever may be the force of the preterite in other languages, in Hebrew it is used with strict grammatical propriety in describing a past which extends into the present. Gesenius says that the Hebrew preterite is used “for our present, where this denotes a condition or attribute already long continued and still existing, or a permanent or habitual action.” After giving examples, he goes on to exemplify its use when the speaker views the action or state expressed by the verb as then first about coming to pass, in progress, or perhaps occurring at the instant. The words in italics exactly describe the use of the preterite by Solomon in this passage. W. T. B.—Hengstenberg says: “The use of the preterite is no argument against Solomon’s being the author of the book. The preterite is very frequently employed in descriptions of a past which stretches forward into the present, and therefore is it rendered with perfect justice in the Berleburger Bible, ‘I the preacher have been king thus far, and am one still.’” Indeed, if the writer was speaking of the past only, it was perfectly natural for him to say, “I tried my experiments in the most favorable circumstances, I was king over Israel in Jerusalem.” This by no means implies that he had ceased to be king. Y.

13. It is the vanity of human effort after such knowledge as will secure and render stable our present happiness which the writer is going to discuss. He declares at the outset that this employment is an unhappy one, although Providence has seen fit to discipline men thereby. M. S.

God. Thirty-nine times in this book God is named as Elohim, which was common to the true God and to false gods, and was used by believers and by idolaters; but the name Jehovah, by which He is known peculiarly to the people who are in covenant with Him, is never once used. Perhaps the chief reason for this is that the evil which is the object of inquiry in this book is not at all peculiar to the chosen people. The whole human race, all creation (Rom. 8), groans under it. Both the partial explanation given of it in this book—viz., the disharmony between God’s will and man’s will, and the advice founded on that explanation, were, in the time of the old dispensation, capable of being understood and practised almost equally by persons without the covenant as by Israelites. Though the Preacher’s reasoning would come home with more convincing force to a believing Jew, yet it would meet with a response from the heart of many a pious and thoughtful heathen. He does not write of or to the Hebrew race exclusively. W. T. B.

14. All is vanity and striving after wind. One of the most striking passages in the whole compass of English literature on the vanity of human glory occurs in Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” For once the infidel historian moralizes like a Christian preacher, or at least responds to the sentiment of the wise man, “All is vanity.” After reviewing the sixty successive reigns of the Greek emperors, most of them of very brief duration, he makes these reflections: “A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to grasp at a precarious and short-lived enjoyment. It is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view. In a composition of some days—in a perusal of some hours—six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment; the grave is ever beside the throne; the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings that have passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell even in our remembrance.” The historian looks not beyond the horizon of time. The dates of the birth and the “downfall” of an empire bound his vision. But what would have been his reflections could he have taken his stand beyond the bounds of time, and surveyed the sweep of human ambition from the heights of eternity! Anon.

15. The passage (7:13) seems manifestly parallel to this, and therefore may give us a clew to the meaning here. “Consider the work of God, for who can make that straight which He hath made crooked?” In consequence of sin God has subjected the course of nature to certain physical evils, e.g., destructive storms, ruinous droughts, extremes of heat and of cold, earthquakes, pestilence, disease, death. The sense of the original words is, Who can reduce to order that which God hath put in disorder? Who can change the ordinations of His providence in the rule of earthly things? H. C.—Human efforts are vain and fruitless, because they cannot change or amend the constitution and course of things. What the writer means in the present case is that there are numerous causes of human misery and suffering which lie under no control of man. Many things are lacking which might administer to his comfort that cannot be at all supplied by any human effort.

18. The reason is here given of what is asserted at the close of the preceding verse. Irritation or vexation and sorrow result from the often-disappointed hopes and efforts to extend one’s knowledge. M. S.—Is this life worth living? No, he tells us, if this world is all of life. The changes, new and wondrous to the young, soon mock us with their ever-recurring cycle, and sink to the unceasing iteration of monotone. There is no joy or good for the heart and soul in wisdom that goes no farther than “all that is done under the sun,” for, while it has its great advantages, it brings along its inseparable skeleton, sorrow. Wisdom soon finds out its petty limitations, and beats in vain against the myriad knots it cannot untie. It cannot even insure a man bread, or deliver him from the accidents of life. It cannot answer the question of all questions, “What is best for a man in this life?” nor reveal a moment of the future, nor save man from death. H. Osgood.

Though this proposition may require to be received with some limitations, certain it is that the mere knowledge of things, the mere perception of truth, is something extremely different, something entirely separable from the enjoyment of things, the possession of real happiness. There is not between the two the slightest necessary connection; there may exist in the same character the scantiest portion of the one in union with the largest measure of the other. We by no means find that the more things we know the more we enjoy our existence; and the simple reason is that knowledge has its abode in the understanding, while happiness is seated, not in the understanding, but in the heart; so that the condition of the rudest peasant may be an object of envy to the most enlightened philosopher. In a word, happiness is a state which we are all equally concerned to attain; but wealth and knowledge are conditions accessible only to a few. Happiness has its seat in the heart; but wealth and knowledge are not adapted to satisfy our affections; therefore wealth or knowledge cannot be supposed to constitute that proper happiness of man, without which he is “made in vain.” R. Hall.

Mere earthly knowledge is painful in its contents. For an illustration of this we may go to history. Take away our hope in God, and history becomes a sea of tumbling billows, dark and shoreless; nations rising only to fall; great souls shooting across the horizon like dying meteors; and all the spiritual longings of the past written down but to tell us of the vanity of our own efforts. We could bear to study history only as we forget all the higher ends it might serve as a school of training for immortal souls, and as the steps of a Divine Architect through the broken scaffolding and scattered stone-wreck upward to a finished structure. The very glimpse of this is reviving, but to give up at once Architect and end, and see human lives shattered and strewn across weary ages, and human hearts torn and bleeding, with no abiding result, this surely would fill a thoughtful mind with pain. The more of such history, the more of sorrow. Mere earthly knowledge is hopeless in its issue. For an illustration of this we may take the field of abstract thought. Let a man seek the origin and end of things without God, and doubt grows as search deepens, for doubt is on the face of all things if it be in the heart of the inquirer. As he enlarges the circumference of knowledge he enlarges the encircling darkness, and even the knowledge yields no ray of true satisfaction. Ker

There is an increase of sorrow, both because the objects of knowledge do but increase and the more he knows do multiply the more upon him, so as to beget a despair of ever knowing so much as he shall know himself to be ignorant of; and a thousand doubts about things he hath more deeply considered which his confident (undiscovered) ignorance never dreamed of or suspected. And thence an unquietness, an irresolution of mind, which they that never drove at any such mark are (more contentedly) unacquainted with. And also, because that by how much knowledge hath refined a man’s soul, so much it is more sensible and perceptive of troublesome impressions from the disorderly state of things in the world; which they that converse only with earth and dirt have not spirits clarified and fine enough to receive. So that, except a man’s knowing more than others were to be referred to another state, the labor of attaining thereto, and other accessory disadvantages, would hardly ever be compensated by the fruit or pleasure of it. Howe.

Mere earthly knowledge is discouraging in its personal results. Earthly science can do very much to improve man’s external circumstances. It can occupy his reason, it can refine and gratify his taste; but there are greater wants that remain. If the man seeks something to fill and warm his heart, all the wisdom of this world is only a cold phosphorescence. He must say with Goethe, “Alas that the yonder is never here!” The tree of knowledge never becomes the tree of life. Ker.

The mistaking or misplacing of the farthest end of knowledge is the greatest error of all the rest; for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to obtain the victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; but seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men. As if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for profit or sale—and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man’s estate. Bacon.

It must be felt at once that the increase of knowledge, merely as such, does not make the soul larger or smaller; that in the sight of God all the knowledge man can gain is as nothing; but that the soul, for which the great scheme of redemption was laid, be it ignorant or be it wise, is all in all; and in the activity, strength, health, and well-being of this soul lies the main difference, in His sight, between one man and another. And that which is all in all in God’s estimate is also all in all in man’s labor; and to have the heart open and the eyes clear, and the emotions and thoughts warm and quick, and not the knowing of this or the other fact, is the state needed for all mighty doing in this world. Therefore let us take no pride in our knowledge. We may, in a certain sense, be proud of being immortal; we may be proud of being God’s children; we may be proud of loving, thinking, seeing, and of all that we are by no human teaching, but not of what we have been taught by rote… With respect to knowledge we are to reason and act exactly as with respect to food. We no more live to know than we live to eat. We live to contemplate, enjoy, act, adore; and we may know all that is to be known in this world and what Satan knows in the other, without being able to do any of these. We are to ask, therefore, first, is the knowledge we would have fit food for us, good and simple, not artificial and decorated? and, secondly, how much of it will enable us best for our work, and leave our hearts light and our eyes clear. Ruskin.

In the region of revealed truth, increasing knowledge will always be increasing conviction, if that knowledge be progressively reduced to practice. If knowledge be merely speculative, in extending it a man may only “increase sorrow;” for it is “with the heart that man believeth unto righteousness,” and it is to the “doers” of his Father’s will that the Saviour promises an assuring knowledge of His own “doctrine.” Hamilton.

Unless it include the knowledge of the living God, there is sorrow in much science—that is, the more a man knows, unless he also knows the Saviour, the sadder may we expect him to become. Of this we have an instance in a late philosopher, who, like Solomon, united to ardor of physical research a thoughtful and musing spirit, and who, in his “Last Days of a Philosopher,” has bequeathed to the world a manual of mournful “Consolations.” It was not from any drawback in his outward lot, nor from any disappointment of his hopes, that Sir Humphry Davy took leave of life so gloomily. Of the sons of science few have been so favored. His whole career was a series of rare felicities. Nor was he the anchoret of science, a lonely and smoke-dried alchemist. He was a man of fashion, and, like Solomon, mingled “madness and folly” with graver pursuits. Yet with all his versatile powers—orator, philosopher, poet—and with all his distinctions glittering around him, his heart still felt hollow, and in his later journals the expressive entry was, “Very miserable.” What was it that he wanted? He himself has told us: “I envy no quality of mind or intellect in others—not genius, power, wit, or fancy; but if I could choose what would be most delightful, and I believe most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing; for it makes life a discipline of goodness, creates new hopes when all earthly hopes vanish, and throws over the decay, the destruction of existence, the most gorgeous of all lights, calling up the most delightful visions, where the sensualist and sceptic view only gloom, decay, and annihilation.” Hamilton.

“I have ever been esteemed,” Goethe wrote, “one of Fortune’s chiefest favorites; nor will I complain or find fault with the course my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has been nothing but toil and care; and I may say that, in all my seventy-five years, I have never had a month of genuine comfort. It has been the perpetual rolling of a stone, which I have always had to raise anew.”

It is the grandeur of the soul which God has given us which makes it insatiable in its desires—an infinite void which cannot be filled up. A soul which was made for God, how can the world fill it? God is love and goodness. Fill the soul with goodness, and fill the soul with love, that is the filling it with God. There is nothing else that can satisfy. So that when we hear men of this world acknowledge, as they sometimes will do, when they are wearied with this phantom chase of life, sick of gayeties and tired of toil, that it is not in their pursuits that they can drink the fount of blessedness; and when we see them, instead of turning aside either broken-hearted or else made wise, still persisting to trust to expectations—at fifty, sixty, or seventy years still feverish about some new plan of ambition—what we see is this: we see a soul formed with a capacity for high and noble things, fit for the banquet table of God Himself, trying to fill its infinite hollowness with husks. F. W. R.

Why does the human intellect crave perpetually for new fields of knowledge? It was made to apprehend an Infinite Being; it was made for God. Why does the human heart disclose, when we probe it, such inexhaustible capacities for love, and tenderness, and self-sacrifice? It was made to correspond to a love that had neither stint nor limit; it was made for God. Why does no employment, or success, or scene or field of thought, or culture of power or faculty, or friend or relative, arrest definitely and forever the onward, craving, restless impulse of our inner being? No other explanation is so simple as that we were made for the Infinite and Unchangeable God, compared with whom all else is imperfect, fragile, transient, and unsatisfying. This indeed is the true moral of this wonderful book, in which a superficial and unspiritual criticism, which indeed must move a Christian’s deepest compassion, can see nothing but “the doubts and confessions of a jaded epicurean.” All that is not God is vanity, in that it yields no true response to the deep and irrepressible cravings of the soul of man. H. P. L.

There must be another world, a higher life, a sublimer sphere. That alone can be the complement of this human, mortal experience. Admit that there is an unseen God, an immortal future, a perfect life beyond the grave, and what is otherwise vanity becomes filled with inspiring significance; what was otherwise vexation is compensated by boundless consolation. Augustine was right: “Thou, O God,

hast made us for Thee; and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.” Man can only reach his wholeness in holiness; and this world can only

become bright and beautiful as it wheels into its orbit about the Sun of Righteousness. Pierson.