the scene of his life's troublesome drama. In this feature he resembles to a considerable extent the humanists of an earlier date (see p. 119), but in others, and those the most characteristic, he differs as widely from them as the old man from the child. They believed that virtue was crowned by prosperity; even the writer of Job, as some think, had not wholly cast off the consecrated dogma; but the austere and lonely thinker who has left us Ecclesiastes finds himself utterly unable to harmonise such a theory with facts (viii. 14). To him, living during one of the dreariest parts of the post-Exile period, it seemed as if the past aspirations of Israel had turned out a gigantic mistake. That home-sickness which impelled, if not the Second Isaiah himself, yet many who were stirred by his eloquence, to exchange a life of ease and luxury for one of struggle and privation—in what had it issued? In 'vanity and pursuit of wind' (comp. Isa. xxvi. 18). To quote a great Persian poet, who in some of his moods resembles Koheleth (see end of Chap. IX.),
The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd,
Who rose before us and as Prophets burn'd,
Are all but Stories, which, arose from Sleep,
They told their fellows, and to Sleep return'd.
Such thoughts as these made the history of Israel an aid to scepticism rather than to faith; added to which it is probable that society in Koheleth's[1] time seemed to him too corrupt to admit of an idealistic theory of life. For an individual to seek to put in practice such a theory would expose him to hopeless failure and misery. Therefore, 'be not righteous overmuch,[2] neither pretend to be exceedingly wise; why wilt thou ruin (lit. desolate) thyself?' (vii. 16). Some, no doubt, as the Soferim or Scripturists, had tried it, but they had only succeeded in making their lives 'desolate,' without any compensating advantage. Nor can we say that Ecclesiastes had given up theistic religion. He does not indeed
