Now in reading this Book of Ecclesiastes--which I am afraid a great
many people do not read at all--we have always to remember that the
wild things and the bitter things which the Preacher is saying so
abundantly through its course do not represent his ultimate
convictions, but thoughts that he took up in his progress from error
to truth. His first word is: 'All is vanity!' That conviction had been
set vibrating in his heart, as it is set vibrating in the heart of
every man who does as he did, viz., seeks for solid good away from
God. That is his starting-point. It is not true. All is not vanity,
except to some _blase_ cynic, made cynical by the failure of
his voluptuousness, and to whom 'all things here are out of joint,'
and everything looks yellow because his own biliary system is out of
order. That is the beginning of the book, and there are hosts of other
things in the course of it as one-sided, as cynically bitter, and
therefore superficial. But the end of it is: 'Let us hear the
conclusion of the whole matter; fear God, and keep His commandments:
for this is the whole duty of man.' In his journey from the one point
to the other my text is the first step, 'One generation goeth, and
another cometh: the earth abideth for ever.'
He looks out upon humanity, and sees that in one aspect the world is
full of births, and in another full of deaths. Coffins and cradles
seem the main furniture, and he hears the tramp, tramp, tramp of the
generations passing over a soil honeycombed with tombs, and therefore
ringing hollow to their tread. All depends on the point of view. The
strange history of humanity is like a piece of shot silk; hold it at
one angle, and you see dark purple, hold at another, and you see
bright golden tints. Look from one point of view, and it seems a long
history of vanishing generations. Look to the rear of the procession,
and it seems a buoyant spectacle of eager, young faces pressing
forwards on the march, and of strong feet treading the new road. But
yet the total effect of that endless procession is to impress on the
observer the transiency of humanity. And that wholesome thought is
made more poignant still by the comparison which the writer here draws
between the fleeting generations and the abiding earth. Man is the
lord of earth, and can mould it to his purpose, but it remains and he
passes. He is but a lodger in an old house that has had generations of
tenants, each of whom has said for a while, 'It is mine'; and they all
have drifted away, and the house stands. The Alps, over which Hannibal
stormed, over which the Goths poured down on the fertile plains of
Lombardy, through whose passes mediaeval emperors led their forces,
over whose summits Napoleon brought his men, through whose bowels this
generation has burrowed its tunnels, stand the same, and smile the
same amid their snows, at the transient creatures that have crawled
across them. The primrose on the rock blooms in the same place year
after year, and nature and it are faithful to their covenant, but the
poet's eyes that fell upon them are sealed with dust. Generations have
gone, the transient flower remains. 'One generation cometh and another
goeth,' and the tragedy is made more tragical because the stage stands
unaltered, and 'the earth abides for ever.' That is what sense has to
say--'the foolish senses'--and that is all that sense has to say. Is
it all that can be said? If it is, then the Preacher's bitter
conclusion is true, and 'all is vanity and chasing after wind.'
He immediately proceeds to draw from this undeniable, but, as I
maintain, partial fact, the broad conclusion which cannot be rebutted,
if you accept what he has said in my text as being the sufficient and
complete account of man and his dwelling-place. If, says he, it is
true that one generation comes and another goes, and the earth abides
for ever, and if that is all that has to be said, then all things are
full of labour. There is immense activity, and there is no progress;
it is all rotary motion round and round and round, and the same
objects reappear duly and punctually as the wheel revolves, and life
is futile. Yes; so it is unless there is something more to be said,
and the life that is thus futile is also, as it seems to me,
inexplicable if you believe in God at all. If man, being what he is,
is wholly subject to that law of mutation and decay, then not only is
he made 'a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death,'
but he is also inferior to that persistent, old mother-earth from
whose bosom he has come. If all that you have to say of him is, 'Dust
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,' then life is futile, and
God is not vindicated for having produced it.
And there is another consequence that follows, if this is all that we
have got to say. If the cynical wisdom of Ecclesiastes is the ultimate
word, then I do not assert that morality is destroyed, because right
and wrong are not dependent either upon the belief in a God, or on the
belief in immortality. But I do say that to declare that the fleeting,
transient life of earth is all does strike a staggering blow at all
noble ethics and paralyses a great deal of the highest forms of human
activity, and that, as has historically been the case, so on the large
scale, and, speaking generally, it will be the case, that the man
whose creed is only 'To-morrow we die' will very speedily draw the
conclusion, 'Let us eat and drink,' and sensuous delights and the
lower side of his nature will become dominant.
So, then, the Preacher had not got at the bottom of all things, either
in his initial conviction that all was vanity, or in that which he
laid down as the first step towards establishing that, that man passes
and the earth abides. There is more to be said; the sad, superficial
teaching of the Preacher needs to be supplemented.
Now turn for a moment to what does supplement it.