Ecclesiastes 7:19-29

Ecclesiastes 7:19-8

Koheleth seems to have had a suspicion all the time that his view of life was a low one. He intimates that he had tried for a better, but failed to reach it: "I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me." "Far remaineth" (so Ecclesiastes 7:24 should read) "Far remaineth what was far, and deep remaineth what was deep."

I. From his lower standpoint he now sets himself to inquire into the origin of evil. "I applied my mind," he says, "to discover the cause of wickedness, and vice, and mad folly." He finds it, as he thinks, in woman. By her fatal gift of beauty she often lures men to a doom more bitter than death; and at the best she has but a shallow, unbalanced nature, capable of doing much mischief, but incapable of doing any good. In these notions Koholeth does not stand alone. The depreciatory estimate of women used to be accepted almost as a truism, and was not unfrequently adopted by women themselves. It is a woman whom Euripides represents as saying that one man is better than a thousand of her sex.

II. To many of us these sentiments will appear almost inexplicable. Surely, we say to ourselves, the women of whom such things were said must have been very different from the women of the present day; and no doubt they were different through no fault of their own, but by reason of the treatment to which they had been subjected. Contempt for women was at one time universal, and it inevitably had on them a deteriorating effect. As soon as woman received fair play, she proved herself not only equal to man, but superior, lacking, no doubt, some of his best qualities, but possessing others which more than compensated for the deficiency. Scarcely any one in the present day whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration would agree with Koheleth. Instead of his arithmetical calculation about the thousand men and the thousand women, most persons would substitute Oliver Wendell Holmes': that there are at least three saints among women for one among men.

A. W. Momerie, Agnosticism,p. 236.