overmuch' threatened already perhaps to make life an intolerable burden. And though Koheleth erred in the form of his teaching, yet he did well to teach the 'duty of delight' (Ruskin) and to oppose an orthodoxy which sought, not merely to transform, but to kill nature. It is to his credit that he touches on the relations of the sexes with such studious reserve.[1] As a rule, the enjoyments which he recommends are those of the table, which in Sirach's time (Ecclus. xxxii. 3-5) and perhaps also in Koheleth's included music and singing,—in short, festive but refined society. His praise of festive mirth is at any rate more excusable morally than Omar Khayyâm's impassioned commendations of the wine-*cup.[2] As Jeremy Taylor says, 'It was the best thing that was then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a temperate use of permitted pleasures.'[3] Lastly, the admission of the book into the Canon is (perhaps we may say) not less providential than that of the Song of Songs. The latter shows us human nature in simple and healthy relations of life; the former, a human nature in a morbid state and in depressed and artificial circumstances. How to return at least to inward simplicity and health, the latter part (not the Epilogue) of the Book of Job beautifully shows us.
Our great idealist poet Shelley, who so admired Job, dis-*liked Ecclesiastes for the same reason as the ancient heretics already mentioned. One greater than he, our 'sage and serious' Milton, justifies the sacred Scripture for the variety of its contents on the same ground that he advocates 'unlicensed printing.' Both are 'for the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.' We need not, then, he says, be surprised if the Bible 'brings in holiest men passionately murmuring
- ↑ Once Koheleth appears as a sharp critic of the female sex (vii. 26-29).
- ↑ Lagarde describes Omar as 'ein schlemmer, der die angst des irdischen daseins und die öde langeweile seiner noch in den anfängen stehenden wissenschaft hinwegzuschwelgen suchte' (Symmicta, 1877, p. 9). Too hard a judgment perhaps on this changeful and impressionable nature. See Bodenstedt's version as well as Fitzgerald's.
- ↑ The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, chap. i., sect. 3. Parts of this chapter remind us strongly of Koheleth, and are strange indeed in a book of Christian devotion.
