sises Job's difficulty for him. Thus constrained, he finds himself able to maintain, as against Bildad and the others, that sin and suffering or righteousness and prosperity do not operate as causes and effects. Yet, notwithstanding, he acquiesces in Yahveh's absolute justice. The two views never are brought to a point of unity, because Job could not comprehend how a holy God, coming into continual contact with a sinful world, was able to preserve his purity untarnished. With him difficulty induced moral scepticism. But this was only a phase which a reaffirmation of faith in God's omnipotence effectively dispelled. The personal standard is found to be of no service when applied to the universe as a whole, and the expulsion of deity affords no relief to the perplexed soul. Assertion of self brings Job very near spiritual death. Nevertheless, even if his understanding were too weak to solve the moral problem, his good will, his persistence in righteousness, constituted a practical reply to his intellectual, no less than to his moral, doubts. So pessimism, as attested by experience, received consecration. Here, as it ever must, it takes its place as an element in the serious battle of life. Easy-going acceptance of trial is ruled impracticable, for, by some means, difficulty must be fought and transformed by defeat. The solution suggests more than appears at a glance. The presence of the Lord braces the man, for he learns that human injustice possesses no divine sanction, while apparent divine injustice may assume another aspect when regarded from a higher standpoint. "God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven. Then did he

see it, and declare it; he established it, yea, and searched it out. And unto man he said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding." To overcome pessimism completely, by rendering it organic to spiritual progress, man has yet to learn how to set about the discovery, in intellect, will, and sentiment, of the implications of the presence of divine wisdom.

The author of Ecclesiastes approaches pessimism more closely than the poet of Job. Alone among Old Testament writers he furnishes testimony on behalf of that divine "aloofness" which has been too often charged upon Judaism. With none of Job's imaginativeness, warmth is missed, and the impression of coldness is intensified by the didactic character of the work. Sustained reflection is accompanied by absence of sympathy, and by a laconic harshness that repels one. But the outstanding difference between the two books, from which the pessimism of the later proceeds, lies in the exclusively negative character of Ecclesiastes. Job's hope, leaning on the justice of God, accepts what, for this world, is the old solution, and rests contented. Koheleth perceives the impossibility of obtaining any reply beyond the ancient lines, and is thoroughly conscious of the failure. He has no expectation, and so his pessimism is not "touched to finer issues." With him ideals have all but disappeared, and his scepticism is depressingly prosaic. Is he, then, that unique phenomenon, a Jewish pessimist?

There is little, if any, room for question that Ecclesiastes was written during one among the many sad postexilian periods in the history of Israel. The philoso1 Chap. xxviii. 23, 24, 27, 28.

phical, rather than philological, considerations which we now desire to urge are little affected by the date which may be reasonably assigned to it, whether this be 450, 330, or 200 B.C. Evidence abounds to show that the historical circumstances were fraught with chastening influences for the writer, whom we may call by the name of his hero, Koheleth. The age of the prophets, with its imaginative fertility, poetic fire, and moral idealism, had passed away. The Sibylline period, filled with the fervour of revived hopefulness, was not yet. The favoured nation was passing through a vale of tears, whence the face of Yahveh seemed to have wholly disappeared. As a consequence, religion lost its former significance; it did not now enter as before into the commonest acts of the work-a-day world, ennobling them and charging them with a strange significance. Not indeed that worship was dead; but for some its old meaning had largely departed. It was no more performed as a matter of delight; calculation had almost imperceptibly taken the place of unquestioning compliance. The Jews, as represented by Koheleth, had entered upon a reflective stage, when, bereft of immediate bright prospects, they found time for present problems which, in better days, could hardly have occurred to them. The early promise of the national career paused in its efflorescence, and, perceiving the stagnation, the people sought to find its cause. Koheleth wrote at some such juncture, attempting not so much to frame a theory of the universe, as to silence a clamant question.

Accordingly, when we speak of the "pessimism of ✓ Koheleth" we must not be understood to imply any

Koheleth was no

thing like the modern doctrine. system-monger. He did not brace himself to account for the wretchedness of things. But, given enough and to spare of pressing evils, he asked, How can man best order his life in these miserable circumstances? "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" So far as we are aware, he did not, like Job, experience poignant reverses in his own person, and set himself to elucidate the mystery which involves the innocent in suffering. He rather looked round upon his nation and country as he happened to find them, and, constrained to declare, "behold, they are very bad," he attempted to distil all possible good from the surrounding evil. Bad as it all is, he seemed to argue, We are here, and may as well try to make the best of matters: how is this to be done most effectually? Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him. For he knoweth not that which shall be; for who can tell him when it shall be?"

One need not insist upon the contrast between this and the religio-optimistic view of life peculiar to the Jews in their more prosperous times. Faith has now completely given way to reason, the teleological interpretation prevalent in the past appears to affect the present scarce at all. It is as if a break had occurred in the continuity of events. The present is all in all, the past has gone, leaving hardly a trace, and as for the future, well, it may be left to look after itself. It is this aspect of the book which leads us to speak of Koheleth's pessimism. His attitude towards life as a whole, his absorption in mundane affairs, his extraordinary nearly experimental-interest in self, above

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all, his lack of inspiration in regard to moral problems, are characteristic of a state of mind which, perhaps in spite of self, cannot but be gloomy and sardonic, or if you will, pessimistic.) The mood of the man, in contradistinction to his formal philosophising, is to be described by the word which for us bears an entirely different import. He did not try to improve deity out of existence, neither was it his aim to show that this must be the worst of all possible worlds. It would be truer to say that (he gave utterance to the least hopeful, or perhaps the most forbidding, estimate of human life which a Jew, nurtured in the religion of Yahveh, could conceivably formulate.) And in order to do this, he entertained doctrines, and limited himself as respected the range of his inquiry, in a manner which has been characteristic of pessimism in all its stages. Because he was a Jew, he could not be an atheist, like Schopenhauer and Hartmann, or even Omar Khayyam.) Because he was a man, he was liable to those moments of weakness in which the body obscures the spirit, and when the necessities of an earthly to-day preclude any broad view of human life in its completeness. Schopenhauer may tell us to curse God and commit suicide, Hartmann may in effect declare that God is the devil, Koheleth has no such titillating message. But like the moderns, with whom he is so often wrongly classed he sees all existence in the shadow of daily struggle. Men are here, they come no one knows whence, they strive awhile, and return to the same voiceless void. "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre