The word rendered in our text 'travail' is a favourite one with the
writer. It means occupation which costs effort and causes trouble. The
phrase 'to be exercised therewith,' rather means to _fatigue
themselves_, so that life as looked upon by the Preacher consists
of effort without result but weariness.
If he knew it at all, it was very imperfectly and dimly; and whatever
may be thought of teaching on that subject which appears in the formal
conclusion of the book, the belief in a future state certainly
exercises no influence on its earlier portions. These represent phases
through which the writer passes on his way to his conclusion. He does
believe in 'God,' but, very significantly, he never uses the sacred
name 'Lord.' He has shaken himself free, or he wishes to represent a
character who has shaken himself free from Revelation, and is fighting
the problem of life, its meaning and worth, without any help from Law,
or Prophet, or Psalm. He does retain belief in what he calls 'God,'
but his pure Theism, with little, if any, faith in a future life, is a
creed which has no power of unravelling the perplexed mysteries of
life, and of answering the question, 'What does it all mean?' With
keen and cynical vision he looks out not only over men, as in this
first chapter, but over nature; and what mainly strikes him is the
enormous amount of work that is being done, and the tragical poverty
of its results. The question with which he begins his book is, 'What
profit hath a man of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the
sun?' And for answer he looks at the sun rising and going down, and
being in the same place after its journey through the heavens; and he
hears the wind continually howling and yet returning again to its
circuits; and the waters now running as rivers into the sea and again
drawn up in vapours, and once more falling in rain and running as
waters. This wearisome monotony of intense activity in nature is
paralleled by all that is done by man under heaven, and the net result
of all is 'Vanity and a strife after wind.'
The writer proceeds to confirm his dreary conclusion by a piece of
autobiography put into the mouth of Solomon. He is represented as
flinging himself into mirth and pleasure, into luxury and debauchery,
and as satisfying every hunger for any joy, and as being pulled up
short in the midst of his rioting by the conviction, like a funeral
bell, tolling in his mind that all was vanity. 'He gave himself to
wisdom, and madness, and folly'; and in all he found but one
result--enormous effort and no profit. There seemed to be a time for
everything, and a kind of demonic power in men compelling them to toil
as with equal energy, now at building up, and now at destroying. But
to every purpose he saw that there was 'time and judgment,' and
therefore, 'the misery of man was great upon him.' To his jaundiced
eye the effort of life appeared like the play of the wind in the
desert, always busy, but sometime busy in heaping the sands in
hillocks, and sometimes as busy in levelling them to a plain.
We may regard such a view of humanity as grotesquely pessimistic; but
there is no doubt that many of us do make of life little more than
what the Preacher thought it. It is not only the victims of
civilisation who are forced to wearisome monotony of toil which barely
yields daily bread; but we see all around us men and women wearing out
their lives in the race after a false happiness, gaining nothing by
the race but weariness. What shall we say of the man who, in the
desire to win wealth, or reputation, lives laborious days of cramping
effort in one direction, and allows all the better part of his nature
to be atrophied, and die, and passes, untasted, brooks by the way, the
modest joys and delights that run through the dustiest lives. What is
the difference between a squirrel in the cage who only makes his
prison go round the faster by his swift race, and the man who lives
toilsome days for transitory objects which he may never attain? In the
old days every prison was furnished with a tread-mill, on which the
prisoner being set was bound to step up on each tread of the revolving
wheel, not in order to rise, but in order to prevent him from breaking
his legs. How many men around us are on such a mill, and how many of
them have fastened themselves on it, and by their own misreading and
misuse of life have turned it into a dreary monotony of resultless
toil. The Preacher may be more ingenious than sound in his pessimism,
but let us not forget that every godless man does make of life 'Vanity
and strife after wind.'