Ecclesiastes 11:9

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth Strictly speaking, as the beginning of the end, the opening of the finaleof the book, these should be read in close connexion with chap. 12. The Debater turns with his closing counsel to the young. That counsel, like the rest of the book, has been very variously interpreted. (1) Men have seen in it the stern irony of the ascetic, killing the power of rejoicing in the very act of bidding men rejoice, holding before the young man the terrors of the Lord, the fires of Gehenna. Coarsely paraphrased, the counsel so given is practically this, "Follow your desires, take your fling, sow your wild oats, go forth on the voyage of life, -youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm," but know that all this, the -primrose path of dalliance," ends in Hell and its eternal fires." It is not without significance, from this point of view, that the counsel given is almost in direct contradiction to the words of the Law, brought, we may believe, into notice by the growing stress laid on the use of phylacteries, on which those words were written, which warned men that they should not "seek after their own heart and their own eyes" (Numbers 15:39). (2) Men have also seen in it the unchastened counsel of the lowest form of Epicureanism, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Leave no desire ungratified, seek the maximum of intense enjoyment, crowd the sensations of a life-time into a few short years." (3) Even the closing words have, by a strange ingenuity, been turned into a protest against asceticism. "God will judge you, if you slight His gifts. Self-denial is for Him no acceptable service. He rejoices in your joy, will punish the gloomy Pharisee or Essene who mortifies the flesh, by leaving him to his self-inflicted tortures." Once again men have looked at the shield on its gold or its silver side: and the Truth is found in seeing it on both. Once again we may recognise the method of one who spoke φωνήεντα συνέτοισιν ("full of meaning to those who have eyes to see"), and uttered his precepts with a double sense as a test of the character of those who heard or read them. The true purport of the words seems to be as follows. After the manner of chs. Ecclesiastes 2:24; Ecclesiastes 3:12; Ecclesiastes 3:22; Ecclesiastes 5:18; Ecclesiastes 9:7, the Debater falls back on the fact that life is after all worth living, that it is wise to cultivate the faculty of enjoyment in the season when that faculty is, in most cases, as by a law of nature, strong and capable of being fashioned into a habit. So moralists in our own time, preachers of "sweetness and light," have contrasted the gloomy plodding Philistinism or Puritanism of the English as a people, "qui s'amusent moult(bien) tristement" (Froissart), with the brightness and gaiety of the French, and have urged us to learn wisdom from the comparison. In good faith he tells the young man to "rejoice in his youth," to study the bent of his character, what we should call his æsthetic tastes, but all this is not to be the reckless indulgence of each sensuous impulse, but to be subject to the thought "God will bring thee into judgment." What the judgment may be the Debater does not define. It may come in the physical suffering, the disease, or the poverty, or the shame, that are the portion of the drunkard and the sensualist. It may come in the pangs of self-reproach, and the memory of the "mala mentis gaudia." "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make whips to scourge us." It is singularly significant to find an echo of the precept so given in the teaching of the great Poet of the more atheistic type of Epicureanism, obliged, as in spite of himself, to recognise the fact of a moral order in the world:

"Inde metus maculat pœnarum præmia vitæ.

Circumretit enim vis atque injuria quemque,

Atque, unde exorta est, ad eum plerumque revertit;

Nec facile est placidam ac pacatam degere vitam,

Qui violat facteis communia fœdera pacis.

Etsi fallit enim divom genus humanumque,

Perpetuo tamen id fore clam diffidere debet."

"Hence fear of vengeance life's best prizes mars;

For violence and wrong take him who works them,

As in a net, and to their source return.

Nor is it easy found for him who breaks

By deeds the common covenants of peace

To lead a placid and a peaceful life.

For grant he cheat the gods and all mankind,

He cannot hope the evil done will be

For ever secret."

Lucr. De Rer. Nat. v. 1151.

Did the judgment of which the thinker speaks go beyond this? That question also has been variously answered. The Debater, it is obvious, does not draw the pictures of the Tartarus and Elysian Fields of the Greek, or of the Gehenna and the Paradise of which his countrymen were learning to speak, it may be, all too lightly. He will not map out a country he has not seen. But the facts on which he dwells, the life of ignoble pleasure, or tyranny, or fraud carried on successfully to the last, the unequal distribution of the pleasures and the pains of life, the obvious retort on the part of the evil-doer that if this life were all, men could take their fill of pleasure and evade the judgment of man, or the misery of self-made reproach and failure, by suicide, all this leads to the conclusion that the "judgment" which the young man is to remember is "exceeding broad," stretching far into the unseen future of the eternal years. Faith at last comes in where Reason fails, and the man is bidden to remember, in all the flush of life and joy, that "judgment" comes at last, if not in man's present stage of being, yet in the great hereafter.