The Preacher

“I the Preacher was King over Israel in Jerusalem.” — ECCLES. I. 12.

THERE is no season of the year so exquisite as the first full burst of Summer: when east winds lose their venom, and the firmament its April fickleness; when the trees have unreefed their foliage, and under them the turf is tender; when, before going to sleep, the blackbird wakes the nightingale, and night itself is only a softer day; when the dog-star has not withered a single flower, nor the mower’s scythe touched one j but all is youth and freshness, novelty and hope — as if our very earth had become a bud, of which only another Eden could be the blossom — as if, with all her green canvas spread, our island were an argosie, floating over seas of balm to some bright Sabbatic haven on the shores of Immortality.

With the Hebrew commonwealth, it was the month of June. Over all the Holy Land there rested a blissful serenity — the calm which follows when successful war is crowned with conquest — a calm which was only stirred by the proud joy of possession, and then hallowed and intensified again by the sense of Jehovah’s favour. And amidst this calm the monarch was enshrined, at once its source and its symbol. In the morning he held his levee in his splendid Basilica — a pillared hall a hundred cubits long.* As he sate aloft on his lion-guarded throne, he received petitions and heard appeals, and astonished his subjects by astute decisions and weighty apoph thegms, till every case was disposed of, and the toils of kingcraft ended. Meanwhile, his chariot was waiting in the square; and, with disdainful hoofs, the light coursers pawed the pavement, impatient for their master; whilst, drawn up on either side, purple squadrons held the ground, and their champing chargers tossed from their flowing manes a dust of gold. And now, a stir in the crowd — the straining of necks and the jingle of horse-gear announce the acme of expectation; and, preceded by the tall panoply of the commander-in- chief, and followed by a dazzling retinue, there emerges from the palace, and there ascends the chariot, a noble form, arrayed in white and in silver, and crowned with a golden coronet; and the welkin rings, “God save the King;” for this is Solomon in all his glory. And, as through the Bethlehem gate, and adown the level causeway,

* See 1 Kings vii.; Josephus’ Antiquities, Bk. viii. chaps,. 57. and Fergusson’s “Palaces of Nineveh Restored,” (1851,) pp. 225-232.

the bickering chariot speeds, the vines on either side of the valley give a good smell, and it is a noble sight to look back to yon marble fane and princely mansions which rear their snowy cliffs over the capital’s new ramparts. It is a noble sight, this rural comfort and that civic opulence — for they evince the abundance of peace and the abundance of righteousness. And when, through orchards and corn fields, the progress ends, the shouting concourse of the capital is exchanged for the delights of an elysian hermitage. After visiting his far-come favourites — the “apes and the peacocks,” — the bright birds and curious quadrupeds which share his retirement; after wandering along the terraces, where under the ripening pomegranates roses of Sharon blossom, and watching the ponds where fishes bask amid the water-lilies, — we can imagine him retiring from the sunshine into that grotto which fed these reservoirs from its fountain sealed; or in the spacious parlor, whose fluttering lattice cooled, and whose cedar wainscot embalmed the flowing summer, sitting down to indite a poem, in which celestial love should overmaster and replace the earthly passion which supplied its imagery. Dipping his pen by turns in Heaven’s rainbow, and in the prismatic depths of his own felicity, with joy’s own ink this Prince of Peace inscribed that Song of Songs which is Solomon’s.

It was June in Hebrew history — the top-tide of a nation’s happiness. Sitting, like an empress, between the Eastern and Western oceans, the navies B 2 of three continents poured their treasures at her feet; and, awed by her commanding name, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah brought spontaneous tributes of spice, and silver, and precious stones. To build her palaces, the shaggy brows of Lebanon had been scalped of their cedars, and Ophir had bled its richest gold. At the magical voice of the Sovereign, fountains, native to distant hills, rippled down the slopes of Zion; and miraculous cities, like Palmyra, started up from the sandy waste. And whilst peace, and commerce, and the law’s protection, made gold like brass, and silver shekels like stones of the street, Palestine was a halcyon-nest suspended betwixt the calm wave and the warm sky; Jerusalem was a royal infant, whose silken cradle soft winds rock high up on a castle tower: all was serene magnificence and opulent security.

Just as the aloe shoots, and in one stately blossom pours forth the life which has been calmly collecting for a century, so would it appear as if nations were destined to pour forth their accumulated qualities in some characteristic man, and then they droop away. Macedonia blossomed, and Alexander was the nower of Greece; fiery and effeminate, voluptuous in his valour, and full of chivalrous relentings amidst his wild revenge. Rome shot up in a spike of glory, and revealed Augustus — so stern and so sumptuous, so vast in his conceptions, so unquailing in his projects, so fearless of the world, and so fond of the seven-hilled city — the Imperial nest-builder. Mediaeval, martial Europe blossomed, and Godfrey and Richard were the twin-flowers of chivalry — Godfrey the captor of Rome and King of Jerusalem; Richard of the lionheart, Richard of the hammer-hand. And modern France developed in one Frenchman, the concentration of a people vain and ambitious, restless and rapid, brilliant in sentiment, and brave in battle; and having flowered the fated once, the Gallic aloe can yield no more Napoleons. So with Palestine at the time we speak of. Half-way between the call of Abraham and the final capture of Jerusalem, it was the high summer of Jewish story, and Hebrew mind unfolded in this pre-eminent Hebrew. Full of sublime devotion, equally full of practical sagacity; the extemporiser of the loftiest litany in existence, withal the author of the pungent Proverbs; able to mount up on Rapture’s ethereal pinion to the region of the seraphim, but keenly alive to all the details of business, and shrewd in his human inter course; zealous in collecting gold, yet lavish in expending it; sumptuous in his tastes, and splendid in costume; and, except in so far as intellectual vastitude necessitated a certain catholicity — the patriot intense, the Israelite indeed: like a Colossus on a mountain-top, his sunward side was the glory toward which one Millennium of his nation had all along been climbing, — his darker side, with its overlapping beams, is still the mightiest object in that nation’s memory.

You have seen a blight in summer. The sky is overcast, and yet there are no clouds; nothing but a dry and stifling obscuration — as if the mouth of some pestilent volcano had opened, or as if sulphur mingled with the sunbeams. “The beasts groan; the cattle are oppressed.” From the trees the embryo fruits and the remaining blossoms fall in an unnoticed shower, and the foliage curls and crumples. And whilst creation looks disconsolate, in the hedgerows the heavy moths begin to flutter, and ominous owlets ciy from the ruin. Such a blight came over the Hebrew summer. By every calculation it ought to have been high noon; but the sun no longer smiled on Israel’s dial. There was a dark discomfort in the air. The people murmured. The monarch wheeled along with greater pomp than ever; but the popular prince had soured into the despot, and the crown sat defiant on his moody brow; and stiff were the obeisances, heartless the hosannas, which hailed him as he passed. The ways of Zion mourned; and whilst grass was sprouting in the temple- courts, mysterious groves and impious shrines were rising everywhere: and whilst lust defiled the palace, Chemosh and Ashtaroth, and other Gentile abominations, defiled the Holy Land. And in the disastrous eclipse beasts of the forest crept abroad. From his lurking-place in Egypt Hadad ventured out, and became a life-long torment to the God-forsaken monarch. And Kezon pounced on Damascus, and made Syria his own. And from the pagan palaces of Thebes and Memphis harsh cries were heard ever and anon, Pharaoh and Jeroboam taking counsel together, screeching forth their threatenings, and hooting insults, at which Solomon could laugh no longer. For amidst all the gloom and misery a message comes from God: the kingdom is rent; and whilst Solomon’s successor will only have a fag-end and a fragment, by right Divine ten tribes are handed over to a rebel and a runaway.

What led to Solomon’s apostasy? And what, again, was the ulterior effect of that apostasy on him self? As to the origin of his apostasy the Word of God is explicit. He did not obey his own maxim. He ceased to rejoice with the wife of his youth; and loving many strangers, they drew his heart away from God. Luxury and sinful attachments made him an idolater, and idolatry made him yet more licentious: until, in the lazy enervation and languid day-dreaming of the Sybarite, he lost the perspicacity of the sage, and the prowess of the sovereign; and when he woke up from the tipsy swoon, and out of the swine-trough picked his tarnished diadem, he woke to find his faculties, once so clear and limpid, all perturbed, his strenuous reason paralysed, and his healthful fancy poisoned. He woke to find the world grown hollow, and himself grown old. He woke to see the sun bedarkened in Israel’s sky, and a special gloom encompassing himself. He woke to recognise all round a sadder sight than winter — a blasted summer. Like a deluded Samson starting from his slumber, he felt for that noted wisdom which signalised his Nazarite days; but its locks were shorn; and, cross and self- disgusted, wretched and guilty, he woke up to the discovery which awaits the sated sensualist: he found that when the beast gets the better of the man, the man is cast off by God. And like one who falls asleep amidst the lights and music of an orchestra, and who awakes amidst empty benches and tattered programmes — like a man who falls asleep in a flower-garden, and who opens his eyes on a bald and locust-blackened wilderness, — the life, the loveliness, was vanished, and all the remaining spirit of the mighty Solomon yawned forth that verdict of the tired voluptuary: — “Vanity of vanities! vanity of vanities! all is vanity!”