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Updated: June 15, 2025
Every moment of life speaks its new word, its new message to us, and, to this we must listen and understand it, without first of all fixing limits for ourselves. After all, what's the good of discussing it? Think what you like. I would merely ask why you, who have read hundreds of books from Ecclesiastes to Marx, have not yet been able to form any definite conception of life?"
The great book of human life, which is one of the most important chapters of divine revelation, was thrown open wide before them. The truths that they read there, as their eyes were divinely opened to see it, are recorded in the wisdom books of the Old Testament, Proverbs, Job, The Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes.
One of the most beautiful emblems of the Judaic books is this passage of Ecclesiastes: "... when the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, when the almond-tree shall flourish and the grasshopper shall be a burden: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain...."
He believed with Ecclesiastes the preacher, that "they are more bitter than death . . . and whoso pleaseth God shall escape from them." He had therefore no other refuge but in his books or his own sullen reflections, and, consequently, his old enemy, hypochondria, again made him its prey.
Concerning the canonicity of two books, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs or Canticles, the opinions of the rabbis continued to differ until the close of the first Christian century. From the Mishna we learn that the school of Shammai accepted Ecclesiastes, while that of Hillel rejected it.
On the title-page is quoted the text Ecclesiastes iii. 19, thus "That which befalleth the sonnes of men befalleth Beasts; even one thing befalleth them all: as the one dyeth so dyeth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that man hath no preheminence above a Beast; for all is vanity." This gives so far the key-note to the 57 pages of matter of the Tract itself.
You remember that passage in Ecclesiastes 'The conclusion of the whole matter'?" And then came the story of Edward Hare. That moved the people deeply. "My first curacy was in Southern Manitoba.
In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field.
Whosoever repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat without ceasing the memento mori. "But to what end?" you will ask.
Can it be that the book of Ecclesiastes is the mere record of the miserable experiences of an embittered and disappointed sensualist, or is it the profound and searching exposition of the vanities of this world as they appear to a lofty searcher after truth and God, measured by the realities of a future and endless life, which the soul emancipated from pollution pants and aspires after with all the intensity of a renovated nature?
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