then known. It is true that their main function was to interpret and
enforce the law of Moses; but this function demanded all science for
its adequate fulfilment. Take a simple illustration. The Law said,
"Thou shalt not kill." Here, if ever, is a plain and simple statute,
with no ambiguities, no qualifications, capable neither of
misconstruction nor evasion. Anybody may remember it, and know what it
means. _May_ they? I am not so sure of that. The Law says I am not to
kill. What, not in self-defence! not to save honour from outrage! not
in a patriotic war! not to save my homestead from the freebooter or my
house from the midnight thief! not when my kinsman is slain before my
eyes and in my defence! Many similar cases might be mooted, and were
mooted, by the Jews. The Master had to consider such cases as these,
to study the recorded and traditional verdicts of previous judges, the
glosses and comments of other Masters; he had to lay down rules and to
apply rules to particular and exceptional cases, just as our English
Judges have to define the Common Law or to interpret a Parliamentary
Statute. The growing wants of the Commonwealth, the increasing
complexity of the relations of life as the people of Israel came into
contact with foreign races, or were carried into captivity in strange
lands, necessitated new laws, new rules of conduct. And as there was
no recognised authority to issue a decree, no Parliament to pass an
Act, the wise Masters, learned in the law of God, were compelled to
lay down these rules, to extend and qualify the ancient statutes till
they covered modern cases and wants. Thus in this very Book, Coheleth
gives the rules which should govern a wise and pious Jew in the new
relations of Traffic (ch. iv., vv. 4-16), and in the service of
foreign despots (ch. x., vv. 1-20). For such contingencies as these
the Law made no provision; and hence the rabbis, who sat in Moses'
chair, made provision for them by legislating in the spirit of the
Law.
Even in the application of known and definite laws there was need for
care, and science, and thought. "The Mosaic code," says Deutsch, "has
injunctions about the Sabbatical journey; the distance had to be
measured and calculated, and mathematics were called into play. Seeds,
plants, and animals had to be studied in connection with many precepts
regarding them, and natural history had to be appealed to. Then there
were the purely hygienic paragraphs, which necessitated for their
precision a knowledge of all the medical science of the time. The
seasons and the feast-days were regulated by the phases of the moon;
and astronomy, if only in its elements, had to be studied." As the
Hebrews came successively into contact with Babylonians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, the political and religious systems of these foreign
races could not fail to leave some impressions on their minds, and
that these impressions might not be erroneous and misleading, it
became the Master to acquaint himself with the results of foreign
thought. Nay, "not only was science, in its widest sense, required of
him, but even an acquaintance with its fantastic shadows, such as
astrology, magic, and the rest, in order that, both as lawgiver and
judge, he might be able to enter into the popular feeling about these
'arts,'" and wisely control it.
The proofs that this varied knowledge was acquired and patiently
applied to the study of the Law by these "masters in Israel" are still
with us in many learned sayings and essays of that period; and in all
these the _conservative_ element or temper is sufficiently prominent.
Their leading aim was, obviously, to honour the law of Moses; to
preserve its spirit even in the new rules or codes which the changed
circumstances of the time imperatively required; to fix their stakes
and pitch their tents in the old fields of thought. So obvious is this
aim, even in the familiar pages of the New Testament, that I need not
illustrate it.
But, on the other hand, the signs of _progress_ are no less decisive,
though we may be less familiar with them. Through all this mass of
learned and deferential comment on the Mosaic Code, there perpetually
crop up sayings which savour of the Gospel rather than of the
Law--sayings that denote a great advance in thought. "_Study is better
than sacrifice_," for example, must have been a very surprising
proverb to the backward-looking Jew. It is only one of many Rabbinical
sayings conceived in the same spirit: but would not the whole
Levitical family listen to it with the wry, clouded face of grave
suspicion? So, when Rabbi Hillel, anticipating the golden rule, said,
"_Do not unto another what thou wouldest not have another do unto
thee; this is the whole law, the rest is mere commentary_," the
lawyers, with all who had trusted in ordinances and observances, could
hardly fail to be shocked and alarmed. So, too, when Rabbi Antigonous
said, "_Be not as men who serve their master for the sake of reward,
but be like men who serve not looking for reward_;" or when Rabbi
Gamaliel said, "_Do God's will as if it were thy will, that He may
accomplish thy will as if it were his_," there would be many, no
doubt, who would feel that these venerable rabbis were bringing in
very novel, and possibly very dangerous, doctrine. Nor could they fail
to see what new fields of thought were being thrown open to them when
Coheleth affirmed the future judgment and the future life of men. Such
"words" as these were in very deed "goads," correcting the errors of
previous thought, and urging men on to new pastures of truth and
godliness.
Sometimes, as I have said, the progressive Sage and the conservative
Master would be united in the same person; for there are those, though
there are not too many of them, who can "stand on the old ways" and
yet "look for the new." But, often, no doubt, the two would be divided
and opposed, then as now. For in thought, as in politics, there are
always two great parties; the one, looking back with affectionate
reverence and regret on the past, and set to "keep invention in a
_noted_ weed;" the other, looking forward with eager hope and desire
to the future, and attached to "new-found methods and to compounds
strange;" the one, bent on conserving as much as possible of the large
heritage which our fathers have bequeathed us; the other, bent on
leaving a larger and less encumbered inheritance to those that shall
be after them. The danger of the conservative thinker is that he may
hold _the debts_ on the estate as part of the estate, that he may set
himself against all liquidations, all better methods of management,
against improvement in every form. The danger of the progressive
thinker is that, in his generous ambition to improve and enlarge the
estate, he may break violently from the past, and cast away many
heirlooms and hoarded treasures that would add largely to our wealth.
The one is too apt to pitch his tents in familiar fields long after
they are barren; the other is too apt to drive men on from old
pastures to new before the old are exhausted or the new ripe. And,
surely, there never was a larger or a more tolerant heart than that of
the Preacher who has taught us that both these classes of men and
teachers, both the conservative thinker and the progressive thinker,
are of God and have each a useful function to discharge; that both the
shepherd who loves his tent and the herdsman who wields the goad, both
the sage who urges us forward and the sage who holds us back, are
servants of the one Great Pastor, and owe whether goad or tent-spike
to Him. Simply to entertain the conception widens and raises our
minds; to have conceived it and thrown it into this perfect form
proves the Sacred Preacher to have been all he claims and more--not
only Sage, Teacher, Master, Author, but also a true Poet and a true
man of God.
It is to be observed, however, that our accomplished Sage limits the
field of mental activity on either hand (ver. 12). His children, his
disciples--"my son" was the rabbi's customary term for his pupils, as
"rabbi," _i.e._ "my father," was the title by which the pupil
addressed his master--are to beware both of the "many books" of the
making of which there was even then "no end," and of that
over-addiction to study which was a "weariness to the flesh." The
latter caution, the warning against "_much_ study," was a logical
result of that sense of the sanitary value of physical labour by
which, as we have seen, the masters in Israel were profoundly
impressed. They held bodily exercise to be good for the soul as well
as for the body, a safeguard against the dreamy abstract moods and the
vague fruitless reveries which relax rather than brace the
intellectual fibre, and which tend to a moral languor all the more
perilous because its approaches are masked under the semblance of
mental occupation. They knew that those who attempt or affect to be
"creatures too bright and good for human nature's daily food" are apt
to sink below the common level rather than to rise above it. They did
not want their disciples to resemble many of the young men who lounged
through the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome, and who, though
always ready to discuss the "first true, first perfect, first fair,"
did nothing to raise the tone of common life whether by their example
or their words; young men, as Epictetus bitterly remarked of some of
his disciples, whose philosophy lay in their cloaks and their beards
rather than in any wise conduct of their daily lives or any endeavour
to better the world. It was their aim to develop the whole man--body,
soul, and spirit; to train up useful citizens as well as accomplished
scholars, to spread the love and pursuit of wisdom through the whole
nation rather than to produce a separate and learned class. And, in
the prosecution of this aim, they enjoined neither the exercises of
the ancient palaestra, nor athletic sports like those in vogue at our
English seats of learning, which are often a mere waste of good
muscle, but useful and productive toils. With Ruskin, they believed,
not in "the gospel of the cricket-bat" or of the gymnasium, but in the
gospel of the plough and the spade, the saw and the axe, the hammer
and the trowel; and saved their disciples from the weariness of
overtaxed brains by requiring them to become skilled artisans, and to
labour heartily in their vocations.
Nor is the caution against "many books," at which some critics have
taken grave offence, the illiberal sentiment it has often been
pronounced. For, no doubt, Coheleth, like other wise Hebrews, was
fully prepared to study whatever science would throw light on the
Divine Law, or teach men how to live. Mathematics, astronomy, natural
history, medicine, casuistry, the ethical and religious systems of the
East and the West,--some knowledge of all these various branches of
learning was necessary, as has been shown, to those who had to
interpret and administer the statutes of the Mosaic code, and to
supplement them with rules appropriate to the new conditions of the
time. In these and kindred studies the rabbis were "masters"; and
what they knew they taught. That which distinguished them from other
men of equal learning was that they did not "love knowledge for its
own sake" merely, but for its bearing on practice, on conduct. Like
Socrates, they were not content with a purely intellectual culture,
but sought a wisdom that would mingle with the blood of men and mend
their ways, a wisdom that would hold their baser passions in check,
infuse new energy into the higher moods and aptitudes of the soul, and
make duty their supreme aim and delight. To secure this great end,
they knew no method so likely to prove effectual as an earnest, or
even an exclusive, study of the Sacred Scriptures in which they
thought they had "eternal life," _i.e._ the true life of man, the life
which is independent of the chances and changes of time. Whatever
studies would illuminate and illustrate these Scriptures they pursued
and encouraged; whatever might divert attention from them, they
discouraged and condemned. Many of them, as we learn from the Talmud,
refused to write down the discourses they delivered in School or
Synagogue lest, by making books of their own, they should withdraw
attention from the Inspired Writings. It was better they thought to
read the Scriptures than any commentary on the Scriptures, and hence
they confined themselves to oral instruction: even their profoundest
and most characteristic sayings would have perished if "fond
tradition" had not "babbled" of them for many an age to come.
If the sentiment which dictated this course was in part a mistaken
sentiment, it sprang from a noble motive. For no ordinance could be
more self-denying to a learned and literary class than one which
forbade them to put on record the results of their researches, the
conclusions of their wisdom, and thus to win name and fame and use in
after generations. But was their course, after all, one which calls
for censure? Has the world ever produced a literature so noble, so
pure, so lofty and heroic in its animating spirit, as that of the
Hebrew historians and poets? "The world is forwarded by having its
attention fixed on the best things," says Matthew Arnold in his
Preface to his selection of Wordsworth's poems, and proceeds to define
the best things as those works of the great masters of song which have
won the approval "of the whole group of civilised nations." But even
those whom the civilised world has acclaimed as its highest and best
have confessed that in the Bible, viewed simply as literature, their
noblest work is far excelled: and what sane man will deny that
"Faust," for example, would cut a sorry figure if compared with "Job,"
which our own greatest living poet has pronounced "the finest poem
whether of ancient or of modern times," or Wordsworth himself if
placed side by side with Isaiah? Who can doubt, then, that the world
would have been "forwarded" if its attention had been fixed on this
"best"? Who can doubt that it would be infinitely sweeter and better
than it is if these ancient Scriptures had been studied before and
above all other writings, if they had been brooded over and wrought
into the minds of men till "the life" in them had been assimilated and
reproduced? The man who has had a classical or scientific education,
and profited by it, must be an ingrate indeed, unless he be the slave
of some dominant crotchet, if he do not hold in grateful reverence the
great masters at whose feet he has sat; but the man who has really
found "life" in the Scriptures must be worse than an ingrate if he
does not feel that a merely mental culture is a small good when
compared with the treasures of an eternal life, if he does not admit
that the main object of all education should be to conduct men through
a course of intellectual training which shall culminate in a moral and
spiritual discipline. To be wise is much; but how much more is it to
be good! Better be a child _in_ the kingdom of heaven than a
philosopher or a poet hanging vaguely about its outskirts.
If any of us still suspect the Preacher's words of illiberality, and
say, "There was no need to oppose the one Book to the many, and to
depreciate these in order to magnify that," we have only to consider
the historical circumstances in which he wrote in order to acquit him
of the charge. For generations the Holy Scriptures had been neglected
by the Jews; copies had grown scarce, and were hidden away in obscure
nooks in which they were hard to find; some of the inspired writings
had been lost, and have not been recovered to this day. The people
were ignorant of their own history, and law, and hope. Suddenly they
were awaked from the slumber of indifference, to find themselves in a
night of ignorance. During the miseries of the Captivity a longing for
the Divine Word was quickened within them. They were eager to acquaint
themselves with the Revelation which they had neglected and forgotten.
And their teachers, the few men who knew and loved the Word, set
themselves to deepen and to satisfy the craving. They multiplied
copies of the Scriptures, circulated them, explained them in the
Schools, exhorted from them in the Synagogues. And, till the people
were familiar with the Scriptures, the wiser rabbis would not write
books of their own, and looked with a jealous eye on the "many books"
bred by the literary activity of the time. It was the very feeling
which preceded and accompanied the English Reformation. _Then_ the
newly-discovered Bible threw all other books into the shade. The
people thirsted for the pure Word of God; and the leaders of the
Reformation were very well content that they should read nothing else
till they had read _that_; that they should leave all other fountains
to drink of "the river of life." The translation and circulation of
the Scriptures was the one work, almost the exclusive work, to which
they bent their energies. Like the Jewish rabbis, Tyndale and his
fellow-labourers did not care to write books themselves, nor wish the
people to read the books they were compelled to write in self-defence.
There is a remarkable passage in Fryth's _Scripture Doctrine of the
Sacrament_, in which, replying to Sir Thomas More, the Reformer says:
"This hath been offered you, is offered, and shall be offered. Grant
that the Word of God, I mean the text of Scripture, may go abroad in
our English tongue ... and my brother Tyndale and I have done, and
will promise you to write no more. If you will not grant this
condition, then will we be doing while we have breath, and show in few
words that the Scripture doth in many, and so at the least save some."
The Hebrew Reformers of the school of Coheleth were animated by
precisely the same lofty and generous spirit. They were content to be
nothing, that the Word of God might be all in all. "The Bible, and the
Bible only," they conceived to be the want of their age and race; and
hence they were content to forego the honours of authorship, and the
study of many branches of learning which under other conditions they
would have been glad to pursue, and besought their disciples to
concentrate all their thoughts on the one Book which was able to make
them wise unto salvation. Learned themselves, and often profoundly
learned, it was no contempt for learning which actuated them, but a
devout godliness and the fervours of a most self-denying piety.
So far the Epilogue may seem a mere digression, not without interest
and value indeed, but having no vital connection with the main theme
of the Poem. It tells us that the Preacher was a sage, a recognised
official teacher, the master of an assembly, a doctor of laws, an
author who had expended much labour on many proverbs, a conservative
shepherd pitching his tent on familiar fields of thought, a
progressive herdsman goading men on to new pastures--_not_ Solomon
therefore, by the way, for who would have described _him_ in such
terms as these? If we are glad to know so much of him, we cannot but
ask, What has all this to do with the quest of the Chief Good? It has
this to do with it. Coheleth has achieved the quest; he has solved his
problem, and has given us his solution of it. He is about to repeat
that solution. To give emphasis and force to the repetition, that he
may carry his readers more fully with him, he dwells on his claims to
their respect, their confidence, their affection. He is all that they
most admire; he carries the very authority to which they most
willingly defer. If they know this--and, scattered as they were
through many cities and provinces, how should they know it unless he
told them?--they cannot refuse him a hearing; they will be predisposed
to accept his conclusion; they will be sure not to reject it without
consideration. It is out of any personal conceit, therefore, nor any
pride of learning, nor even that he may grant himself the relief of
lifting his mask from his face for a moment, that he recounts his
titles to their regard. He is simply gathering force from the willing
respect and deference of his readers in order that he may plant his
final conclusion more strongly and more deeply in their hearts.
And what is the conclusion which he is at such pains to enforce? "_The
conclusion of the matter is this; that God taketh cognizance of all
things: fear Him, therefore, and keep his commandments, for this it
behoveth every man to do; since God will bring every deed to the
judgment appointed for every secret thing, whether it be good or
whether it be bad_" (vv. 13, 14).
Now that this "conclusion" is simply a repetition, in part expanded
and in part condensed, of that with which the Preacher closes the
previous Section, is obvious. _There_ he incites men to a life of
virtue with two leading motives: first, by the fact of the present
constant judgment of God; and, secondly, by the prospect of a future,
a more searching and decisive, judgment. _Here_ he appeals to
precisely the same motives, though now, instead of implying a present
judgment under the injunction "Remember thy Creator," he broadly
affirms that "God takes note of all things;" and, instead of simply
reminding the young that God will bring "the ways of their heart" into
judgment, he defines that future judgment at once more largely and
more exactly as "appointed for every secret thing" and extending to
"every deed," both good and bad. In dealing with the motives of a
virtuous life, therefore, he goes a little beyond his former lines of
thought, gives them a wider scope, makes them more sharp and definite.
On the other hand, in speaking of the forms which the virtuous or
ideal life assumes, he is very curt and brief. All he has to say on
that point now is, "Fear God and keep his commandments;" whereas, in
his previous treatment of it, he had much to say, bidding us for
instance, "cast our bread upon the waters," and "give a portion to
seven, and even to eight;" bidding us "sow our seed morning and
evening," though "the clouds" should be "full of rain," and whatever
"the course of the wind;" bidding us "rejoice" in all our labours, and
carry to all our self-denials the merry heart that physics pain. As we
studied the meaning of the beautiful metaphors of chapter xi., sought
to gather up their several meanings into an orderly connection, and to
express them in a more literal logical form--to translate them, in
short, from the Eastern to the Western mode--we found that the main
virtues enjoined by the Preacher were charity, industry, cheerfulness;
the charity which does good hoping for nothing again, the industry
which bends itself to the present duty in scorn of omen or
consequence; and the cheerfulness which springs from a consciousness
of the Divine presence, from the conviction that, however men may
misjudge us, God knows us altogether and will do us justice. This was
our summary of the Preacher's argument, of his solution of the supreme
moral problem of human life. Here, in the Epilogue, he gives us his
own summary in the words, "Fear God, and keep his commandments."
If we compare these two summaries, there seems at first rather
difference than resemblance between them: the one appears, if more
indefinite, much more comprehensive, than the other. Yet there is one
point of resemblance which soon strikes us. For we know by this time
that on the Preacher's lips "Fear God" does not mean "Be afraid of
God;" that it indicates and demands just that reverent sense of the
Divine Presence, that strong inward conviction of the constant
judgment He passes on all our ways and motives and thoughts, which
Coheleth has already affirmed to be a prime safeguard of virtue. It is
the phrase "and keep his commandments" that sounds so much larger
than anything we have heard from him before, so much more
comprehensive. For the commandments of God are many and very broad. He
reveals his will in the natural universe and the laws which govern it;
laws which, as we are part of the universe, we need to know and to
obey. He reveals his will in the social and political forces which
govern the history and development of the various races of mankind,
which therefore meet and affect us at every turn. He reveals his will
in the ethical intuitions and codes which govern the formation of
character, which enter into and give shape to all in us that is most
spiritual, profound, and enduring. To keep all the commandments
revealed in these immense fields of Divine activity with an
intelligent and invariable obedience is simply impossible to us; it is
the perfection which flows round our imperfection, and towards which
it is our one great task to be ever reaching forth. Is it as inciting
us to this impossible perfection that the Preacher bids us "fear God
and keep his commandments"?