Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
He is no hypocrite, no weary "king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of life.
To Egypt its faith was paramount. Israel in its palmiest days was not more vigilantly, jealously fanatical than Egypt. Every worshiper was a zealot; every ecclesiast an inquisitor. Church and State were inseparably united; law was fused with religion; science and the arts were governed by hieratic canons.
Unmistakably there are parts of every man's nature which are meant to serve, and parts which are appointed to rule, and to let the servants usurp the place of the rulers is to bring about as wild a confusion within as the Ecclesiast lamented that he had seen in the anarchic times when he wrote princes walking and beggars on horseback. As George Herbert has it
They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would outwit the Noseless One and the Night.
The discipline of the French church at Frankfort, Edit. 2, in octavo, Anno 1555, in cap. de Disciplina et Excom., p. 75, and the Ecclesiast. Discipline of the reformed churches of France, printed at London, Anno 1642, Art. 15, 16, and 24, p. 44.
Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the loveliness of The Song of Songs passed into our lives forever.
I have it on the authority of a Mormon ecclesiast, who was in the political confidence of the Church leaders, that President Roosevelt was promised the votes of the Utah delegation and such other convention votes as the Church politicians could control. The death of Senator Hanna made this promise unnecessary, if there ever was an explicit promise. But this much is certain.
If there were no tragedy, there would be farce in the solemnity with which this pretense of free government is staged and managed. Some ecclesiast rises in the pulpit and reads from his list: "It is moved and seconded that we sustain Joseph F. Smith as Prophet, Seer and Revelator to all the world. All who favor this make it manifest by raising the right hand." No motion has been made.
And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation of the third of the "Poèmes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
For after all my own wants were few and simple and the acquisition of valuable pictures and costly furniture is limited by space. Oh! in my small way I was like the weary King Ecclesiast. But "behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking