Solomon the Wise

In standing before the Picture of Solomon, I am conscious of an impression which I have not hitherto experienced — an absence of the dramatic element. All the previous figures have stood in critical situations. Adam in the earden,; Abel in’ the field, Noah sin: the presence of the Divine Judgment, Abraham in his arduous mission, Isaac in his life of domestic sacrifice, Joseph in his dungeon,’ Moses in his desert, Joshua in his wars, Samuel in his call to imperil his worldly prospects, David in his exile from home and country — all have exhibited the spectacle of difficulty and danger. In Solomon we have a life where the difficulty and danger are nod exnimited.. hey, are there; but: they are

unseen. What we do see, in the foreground, is an event which will be found to pertain to the life of every young man in the world — the choice of a profession. Solomon is asked, as many boys and all youths are asked, what he would like to be. He was already a king; but one may be a king in many ways. Solomon is asked what gift he would chiefly prize asa sign of real greatness. There is spread before his fancy what is spread before the fancy of all romantic young men — a choice of golden possibilities. Would he be rich? Would he be powerful? Would he be famous? Would he be an object of admiration? Would he be a wise man, a man of prudence and sagacity? Solomon says, ‘ Let me be wise!’

This seems a very commonplace introduction to a great life. But is it? It is undramatic, no doubt; it is homespun. But what if the crisis of national history has shifted from the theatre to the home! What if in the transition from David to Solomon the drama of human life has z¢se/f assumed an undramatic garb! What if the possibility of tragic

issues has begun to lie, not in war of nations,

SOLOMON THE WISE 28x

not in rise of dynasties, not in political combinations, but just at the fireside and around the family hearth! Would not this alter our view of the commonplaceness! Would it not lead us to reconsider our estimate of the Gallery’s introduction to the life of Solomon — to ask if, after all, there may not be something in this narrative as rich in possible tragedy as was the threatening of a deluge, or the resis- tance to an Egyptian bondage!

Now, I am prepared to show that it was so, that Solomon’s choice of a profession was really one of the most tragic acts of Jewish annals — an act on whose decision was suspended an issue as momentous as ever hung on the prayers of Moses or on the sword of Joshua. Did you ever ask yourself what is the reason that the decision made by Solomon is so highly commended? To me the answer seems clear. His decision is applauded, not mainly because it was a proof of personal character, but because it furnished the hope of escape from a national danger. If Solomon

had set his heart either upon riches or upon military glory, there would have been no guarantee that the silent mine beneath his feet would not explode. For, there was a mine beneath his feet. Peaceful as looked the scene, calm as were the surroundings, there were subterranean fires which one thoughtless deed might bring to the surface. There was, below the crust of the soil, an underground heat which any moment might be fanned into flame by a giddy head or an unsteady hand. The only security from the warmth below was to have absolute coolness above. A hot-headed sovereign, a man on the throne animated by personal motives, would be certain at some point to fire the train. There was wanted on the seat of royalty a balanced mind, an impersonal mind, a mind in whom all private ambitions were subordinated to zeal for the common good. Let us consider this necessity a little more in detail.

I said that when David came into the undivided possession of the empire, Israel was very much in the position of England after the Wars of the Roses. There had been a slaughter among the great leaders. The land was like a steed that had lost his rider; it was moving aimlessly, it was directed nowhere. David obtained the supremacy without a rival, and he transmitted the kingdom to his son. But you will commit a great mistake if you imagine that the party of Saul was crushed because his house was crushed. I hold very strongly that the eleven tribes who followed Saul never submitted to David in their hearts. Poor Rehoboam gets the credit of having split the kingdom into two; I do not believe it was ever really one. It was never anything more than a patched garment. Judah and Benjamin were never truly united. Their union was like the assembling together of an audience to hear a great preacher. David was the preacher. The audience had no bond of brotherhood — not even the acceptance of the preacher’s doctrine. They were kept together simply by the spell of a presence, by the power of a personality, by the commanding chords of a human voice. It was a frail and impotent

thread on which to suspend a kingdom!

For now the voice of the preacher is still! His presence has been withdrawn; another stands in the place he used to occupy. David is dead, and a man of different mould has mounted the rostrum. Will Solomon sway the masses as David did? By natural gifts, no. The new preacher has not the elements of the old. In every respect they are contrasts. David was extemporaneous; Solomon is elaborately prepared. David spoke in outbursts; Solomon deals in rounded periods. David was unconventional; Solomon is steeped in culture. David appealed to human experience; Solomon expounds abstract principles, David revealed the man; Solomon exhibits the scholar. David was the sermon; Solomon gives the sermon. Clearly, if each is to be judged by his natural powers, the second cannot keep together the audience of the first.:

To drop the metaphor, young Solomon had a problem before him. He had to ask himself the question, How shall I keep this already disunited mass from skowzng its disunion? It

was clear to him that to effect this he needed

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a very special gift — a gift quite distinct from the power of making money, or the brilliancy that wins fame. I think, indeed, that the task before Solomon was the greatest that can be imposed on any king, and that the man who performs it deserves to be reckoned amongst the greatest of all sovereigns. We are generally in a mistake on this matter. We are under the impression that to be a king in times of open revolution is a more arduous thing than to be a king in times of unexpressed dissatisfaction. It is the reverse. In times of open revolution a sovereign requires but one power — an adequate army. But when the currents are underground, when the factions are invisible, inaudible, undefinable, when the ferment of discontent is working below the surface and the subterranean heat is making no sign, he who guides the state must have the powers of a prophet. He must have the gift of imagination, the gift of insight, the gift of anticipative sympathy, above all, that gift which defies definition — the thing called tact. The man who can preserveth tranquillity among elements of inward discord is every inch a king.

Now, remember that for nearly forty years this was what Solomon did. His is characteristically the reign of peace; there is not such a period of protracted peace in all the Jewish annals. This in itself would not be a matter of greatness; there is a calm which comes from lethargy — from the absence of vital force. But the peace of Solomon’s reign is the peace of a river; it is calm, not through stagnation, but through balanced movement. It is a peace produced in the midst of natural anarchy, in a sphere where elements tend to stand apart from one another. It is a result achieved, not by the suspension of regal force, but by the prolonged operation of that force. The spectacle afforded to the eye is one of power — of greater power than could be evinced by any military conquest. The military conquest requires an effort suited to the emergency; the preservation of tranquillity amid turmoil needs an energy uniform at all times.

Were I to put the question, Was Queen

Elizabeth or Charles 1. the greater sovereign? there is not a schoolboy who would not answer, ‘Queen Elizabeth. But why do we hold that the earlier is more worthy of praise than the later ruler? Is it because Elizabeth was fortunate and Charles was not? No; our judgment would be quite the same if Charles had won the field of Naseby and levelled his enemies with the dust. The merit of Elizabeth lies in the fact that under her the Revolution never ‘ook place. She had elements of discord in her kingdom as fierce as any which marked the reign of Charles; but Charles let them explode, Elizabeth kept them quiet. We pronounce Elizabeth the creater potentate because her power went deeper down than the power of Charles would have gone even had it been victorious; it could retain an empire in tranquillity when everything conspired to make a conflagration.

Now, I have always felt that there is a strong historical parallel between the Portrait of King Solomon and the Portrait of Queen Elizabeth. I do not know of any two characters living at so wide a distance from each other in space and time who present such a remarkable analogy in their public lives. Both had a very remote prospect of reaching the thrones which they eventually secured. Both attained their position through storm and stress. Both came to a kingdom in which the democracy had been elevated to power through the fall of great families. Both ruled over a state thick-sown with secret dissensions — a state where hostile parties nursed their unspoken jealousies. Both for almost an equal period kept down public disquiet without any display of authority and without any exercise of severity. I am tempted to add one parallel more. Both almost at the last heard the beginnings of a long-suppressed storm — a storm which their successors were to hear with appalling clearness; and the one reign, like the other, had an evening bereft of gold. The marvel in each case is, not that the evening should have been dim, but that the hours of the day should have continued so long bright. Nothing could be a stronger testimony

to the greatness of either sovereign.

Turning now exclusively to Solomon, let us observe the means adopted by him which, in securing this internal tranquillity, succeeded so long and so well. And, first of all, I wish to direct attention to the fact that his whole life is built upon a plan. We are, in my opinion, under a widespread misapprehension as to the character of Solomon. The popular view is that he is the delineation of a double personality — a life divided between wisdom and folly. We picture a man alternating between the cares of state and the pleasures of the sensualist. We figure him as swayed by two opposite impulses — the proclivities of thestatesman and the tendencies of the man of idleness; and we are disposed to regard the latter as the reaction from the former. Now, this is not the view I take of the life of Solomon.. To me he presents the picture of one man. Every incident of his life is to my mind the expression of one and the same tendency. I do not think he ever deviates from his political purpose, nor ever forgets it for a moment.

That he went far astray in his pleasures, that he was not always loyal to his religion, that he was unduly prodigal in his expenditure, I freely admit. But his errors were political errors. They were not moments of reaction from state cares; they were themselves part of his state policy. That they were mistakes, no one will deny; but they were mistakes of the king rather than of the man. They were committed in the pursuance of his plan of statecraft, not in the forgetfulness of it. That plan of statecraft never varied in its aim — to keep dormant that faction of the kingdom which still, with pertinacious loyalty, clung to the memory of the house of Saul.

How was this to be done? One or other of two methods was available — the awakening of a common danger or the suggestion of a common interest. The former has been the usual method of kings in the circumstances of Solomon; they have sought to purchase domestic peace by the incurring of foreign war. A nation divided by factions has often been driven into unity by the call to arm

against another nation. It was so with the

France of 1792; it was so with the Germany of 1870. Many a despot has found outside war conducive to his indoor peace and has not scrupled to strike the match of international discord. A foreign irritant has often produced a home sedative, and the producing of a sedative by this means has often been a policy. It was the successful policy of Napoleon the Great; it was the attempted policy of Napoleon the Little. But it was not the policy of King Solomon. He felt that to cure strife on the homeopathic principle was but a poor salvation — that to heal domestic discord by outdoor discord was but a superficial gain. He wanted peace all round — peace not only in the inner parts, but on the borders and at the gates. Accordingly, he chose another way — what seemed to him a more excellent way. Rejecting the aid of a common danger, he turned for support to a common interest. It seemed to him that he could best bind the heart of Judah to the heart of Benjamin, that he could best reconcile his own tribe with the refractory

eleven tribes, by presenting to them a positive rather than a negative ground for union. It was for this that he strove through all the years. His whole reign was an application of his principle. Sometimes he chose right measures, sometimes wrong; but with the principle itself he was never inconsistent. There is no side of his character which does not, to my mind, bear the stamp of this peacemaking design.

Take) the)domestic) side.) sHere shame decidedly reprehensible. The vast number of matrimonial alliances which he personally and simultaneously contracted are a disgrace to family life; and even for an Eastern monarch, they place him in a low moral category. Yet I do not believe that their dominant motive was sensuality. I think his design was that the family of David should ramify in as many directions as possible at home and abroad. He felt that a common interest is greatly promoted by a common blood. He felt that nothing would weaken the memory of the house of Saul like consanguinity to the house of David. The more branches the Davidic tree could shoot forth in the land of Canaan and the adjacent lands, the more would it be endeared to Semitic eyes. This, I believe, was the motive, the main motive, which lighted the myriad nuptial torches of Solomon. His marriages, regular and irregular, had a political aim. They were meant to graft his blood upon the Hebrew race, to connect that race for the future with his name and lineage, and to elicit the verdict of the generation yet unborn, ‘ The whole land of Israel has a stone in the house of David.’

Take the commercial side. Here at first sight Solomon appears to be the typical money-maker, living exclusively for the wealth he can gather. He seems to have deserted the choice of wisdom for the choice of gold. His ships travel the seas in search of merchandise; they touch at every port where the spirit of commerce dwells. His caravans range the land in the service of the trader; they go forth with native produce and return with foreign treasure. His commercial enterprise extends

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Arabia. It treats with Egypt. It has intercourse with Babylon. It probably touches the shores of India. To outward appearance, the whole aim of his life and of his labours is the amassing of wealth, the acquisition of personal gain. But look deeper, and you will form another view. You will come to the conclusion that, to his mind, the value lay in the pursuing, not in the thing pursued. You will come to see that this itself had for him a political value. The aim of Solomon, as I take it, was to keep the mind of the nation in united employment. Civil war would keep men in aisunited employment. But the battle of human industries was a battle which his people might all fight side by side. Commercial enterprise loomed before the eye of Solomon, not so much in the light of a personal gain as in the light of a popular attraction. Here was an object on which the admirers of the house of Saul and the adherents of the house of David might unite! Here was a cause in which they might work together! Here was at once a

labour and a pleasure in whose pursuit each might forget its wrongs and become the ally of the other! And when the result of this commercial prosperity should appear, when the opulence of the nation should be manifested in its magnificent pageants and its splendid buildings, here was a source of common pride to Judah and Benjamin, a work whose triumph both could claim and whose glory each could share!

But it is on the religious side that the wisdom of Solomon is most resplendent. I do not, of course, speak of those concessions to idolatry which tarnish his later years. I believe these to have been mistaken attempts at conciliation — things in which the wisdom of Solomon failed. But that which exhibits the true religious sagacity of this man is the deed which is indissolubly associated with his name — the building of the temple. Why did he build that temple? I think in losing sight of the man’s character we have missed the full significance of the deed. What was his motive for the; erection’ of that! stately: piler To fulfil a wish of his father? Partly. To satisfy a personal impulse of devotion? Partly. But I think neither of these standing alone nor both united would have impelled Solomon to such a work. Remember that this man was before all things a politician. David would have built the temple for ‘glory to God in the highest’; Solomon -required the additional motive, ‘Peace on earth; goodwill among men. What Solomon wanted above all things was a bond of national unity. Two rival ideals were dividing his empire — the house of David and the house of Saul. To the heart of Solomon there came the suggestion of a third and higher watchword — the house of God. Might not the two other houses be united in this wzder building! Might not the memory of the long feud be made to perish in the common effort to inaugurate another kingdom, in the co-operation of both parties for the construction of a new and glorious palace — a palace compared to which the residence of a Saul and of a David would alike grow dim — a dwelling for the habitation of the King of Kings!

Can you fail to see how in the building of this temple the idea of common co-operation occupies so prominent a place! Why are so many invited to contribute gifts? Why are such numbers solicited to lend a hand? Why is the work divided and subdivided between so many classes of labourers? Why is there a place for those who bear, and a place for those who hew, and a place for those who chip? Why is there such an enormous number of workmen as a hundred and eighty-three thousand and six hundred in a work protracted over seven years? Can there be any answer but one? Do we not see that Solomon wants to be engaged in a work which will be the work of the nation — of the whole nation in all its parts and in all its members. He wants his people to be able to say, not only, ‘Solomon did it,’ but, ‘We all did it with Solomon. He desires that every representative of Jewish life shall have a stone in the building. The children shall bring their gifts to it; the adults shall bring their hands to it; the aged shall bring their prayers to it. The rich shall adorn it with gems; the poor shall serve it with their workmanship. The men of action shall break stones for it; the men of patience shall carry burdens for it; the men of taste shall contribute decorations for it. The poets shall make its songs; the musicians shall weave its memories; the theologians shall form its ritual. That is the hope of Solomon — the dream of repiecing the rent garment. It is the hope that the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin may become tributaries to the river of God, that the wars sown in a divided empire may be forgotten in a united worship, and that the house of Saul may be joined to the house of David by that mysterious secret passage which runs through the house of the Lord.

ORD, Thou art building a temple greater than that of Solomon — the temple of

the Holy Ghost! Give me a stone in the building of that house! Give me a place in the work, suited to my soul! If I have many places in my soul, give me many duties for the temple! In my time of singing, train me for its choir! In my time of business, enrich me for its maintenance! In my time of health, strengthen me to raise its walls! In my time of sickness, give me patience to bear its burdens! I would bring all my possessions of body and mind as subscriptions to the building. I bring Thee my gladness for its morning hymn. I bring Thee my sadness for its evening song. I bring Thee my beauty for its adorning. I bring Thee my defects for its altar of sacrifice. I bring Thee my strength that I may support some part; I bring Thee my weakness that some part may support me. I bring Thee my moments of faith that there may be service by day; I bring Thee my moments of doubt that there may be service by night. I bring Thee my full cup for the hour of thanksgiving; I bring Thee my empty cup for the hour of prayer. Let all the gates of Thy temple be open to my soul, O Lord; for I know not, in life’s revolving,

before what portal I may need to stand!