reached. The only solution reached is that of silence before the insoluble: 'I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.'[1] The two perceptions, Righteousness tendeth to life, and, 'The ungodly prosper in the world,' are left confronting one another like Kantian antinomies.[2] 'The earth is given unto the hand of the wicked!' and yet: 'The counsel of the wicked is far from me; God rewardeth him, and he shall know it!'[3] And this last, the original perception, remains indestructible. The Book of Ecclesiastes has been called sceptical, epicurean; it is certainly without the glow and hope which animate the Bible in general. It belongs, probably, to the fourth century before Christ, to the latter and worse days of the Persian power; with difficulties pressing the Jewish community on all sides, with a Persian governor lording it in Jerusalem, with resources light and taxes heavy, with the cancer of poverty eating into the mass of the people, with the rich estranged from the poor and from the national traditions, with the priesthood slack, insincere and worthless. Composed under such circumstances, the book has been said, and with justice, to breathe resignation at the grave of Israel. Its author sees 'the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power; wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.'[4] He sees 'all things come alike to all, there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked.'[5] Attempts at a philosophic indifference appear, at a sceptical suspension of judgment, at an easy ne quid nimis: 'Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise! why shouldst thou destroy thyself?'[6] Vain attempts, even at a moment which favoured them! shows of scepticism, vanishing as
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