Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/45

SOLOMON 21 become from these sources that it is said that he " made silver and gold at Jeru- salem as plentiful as stones." (2 Chron. i. 15.) There was, however, one fatal fault in Solomon's commercial policy : all the gain went to the palace and the government. Herein lay one of the secrets of the division and fall of the nation immediately upon the close of his career. Naturally, Solomon's commercial greatness, together with the pomp and splen- dor of his court and government, carried his fame to all parts of the earth. But that for which he received the greatest respect from surrounding nations was his wisdom, manifested in many ways but chiefly in his writings. One of the marked effects of David's long and vigorous reign was to stimulate mental activity in the Hebrew mind. The great foreign wars with the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Sabeans, and the surrounding nations, who were more or less advanced in a knowledge of the arts and sciences, had the effect of widening the range of knowledge of Israel as a nation, and of stirring her up to an ambition to excel her neighbors in affairs of peace as well as in those of war. Solomon's peaceful and wise reign, characterized as it was by commercial prosperity, gave the people both the time and means for cultivating the arts. In study and in wisdom the king was the leader of his day and generation. He was learned in political economy, a great king He was learned in music and poetry, having composed some of the most beautiful of the Psalms, such as the second. But in cultivating the fine arts he did not neglect the physical sciences, for he was a botanist, writ- ing of all kinds of trees and plants ; and he was a natural historian, writing works on beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. It would be most interesting to see these science primers prepared by Solomon, and compare them with what we see on the same subjects in our own day. But the Bible has not preserved them, and they have long centuries ago passed into oblivion. Solomon's knowledge was not of that shallow sort which is limited to the sphere of earthly material, " seen things ; " for he was wise with that deeper knowledge which has for its object God and the human soul, and their natures and movements in their natural rela- tions. This wisdom is illustrated and handed down to us in his Proverbs of which we are told he spoke three thousand. A portion of these is in the Book of Proverbs, the others are lost to us. In his poetry also was crystallized much of his wisdom. This consisted of one thousand and five songs, all of which have gone down in the flood of years, with the exception of the Song of Solomon, which is an epithalamium, in which pure wedded love is incarnated. It is a sort of poetry of the family relations, and, therefore, worthy a place in the sacred canon. Taken literally and read with a pure heart, it is eminently fitted to spiritualize the family relations. This theory of this much discussed portion of Solomon's writings by no means shuts out the more spiritual use of the book, wherein we see in it the Church repre sented by the bride and God by the bridegroom. In Ecclesiastes we have the latest conclusions of Solomon's moral wisdom, Read in the light of its general scope rather than the dim light of detached por- tions, it appears as the confessions of a humbled, penitent, believing, godly man,