The Vestibule of Vanity

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

ECCLESIASTES is Solomon the Prodigal, re-exhibited by Solomon the Preacher. The wisest of worldlings here opens a window in his bosom and shows us all those fluctuating emotions and conflicting passions which whirl and eddy in every heart whose currents run opposite ways.

In this separate enclosure, so unlike the surrounding Scripture; such a contrast to the joyous parterre which blossoms beside it,* the traveller has planted the wormwood and the rue, all the bitter herbs and the lurid which he gathered in his grand tour of vanity; and he has left them, at once, a memorial and a medicine — a record of his own painful experiences, and a corrective to curious speculation and sensual indulgence.

The right way to understand Ecclesiastes is to read it alongside of the other Scriptures. Obscure * The Song of Solomon.

in itself we must take the day-light at the end as a lamp, to guide us as we go; and, for its duskier recesses, we may borrow the bright lantern of prophets and evangelists. We shall thus not only find its perusal safe and profitable, but, as its dark sayings flash into significance, and its negations are filled up by counterpart verities, in its very sternness we shall recognise another feature of Revelation’s symmetry. Solomon will tell us the vanity of doubt; the rest of the Bible will tell us the blessedness of a firm belief. Solomon will tell us the misery of the selfist, who seeks to be his own all in all; the evangelists will tell us the blessedness of a true benevolence. Solomon will tell us the vanity of the creature; the rest of the Bible reveals the sufficiency of the great Creator. Solomon will tell us how he amassed unprecedented riches, but found no comfort in them: his shepherd sire will answer by anticipation, “My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Solomon will tell us how, in a palace and a crown, and in imperial fame, he found nothing but chagrin: Jesus will answer, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but in me ye shall have peace.” Solomon the sage will tell us, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Solomon the saint will answer, “0 Saviour, thy love is better than wine. Draw me, and I will run after thee. Tarry with me until the day break and the shadows flee away.”

This passage is the, preamble to the book. And it is an appropriate preface. Like sentinels of cypress,, cold and glaucous, at a winter-garden’s gate, like sphinxes of solemn stone ilanking the entrance of the Silent Land, this prologue is a fit introduction to the mournful stoiy we are about to read, and ushers us at once into its realms of dreariness.

As much as if he said,” It is all a weary goround. This system of things is a perpetual self-repetition, — quite sickening. One generation goes, another comes. The sun rises, and the sun goes down. That was what the sun did yesterday, and what I expect it will do to-morrow. The wind blows north, and the wind blows south; and this is all it has been doing for these thousand years. The rivers run into the sea, and it would be some relief to find that sea up-filling; to perceive the clear waters wetting the diy shingle, and brimming up to the green fields, and floating the boats and fishes up into the forest: but even that inconvenient novelty is denied us; for though the Nile and many a river have been tumb ling a world of water into it, this tide will not overstep its margin; the flood still bulges, but still refuses to cross its bounds. Words* themselves are weariness, and it would tire you to enumerate those everlasting mutations and busy uniformities which make up this endless screw of existence. There are no novelties, no wonders, no discoveries. This universe does not yield an eye-full, an ear-full, to its * crm so rendered by Knobel and others.

occupant. The present only repeats the past, the future will repeat them both. The inventions of to-day are the forgotten arts of yesterday, and our children will forget our wisdom, only to have the pleasure of fishing up, as new prodigies, our obsolete truisms. There is no new thing under the sun, yet no repose. Perpetual functions and transient objects, — permanent combinations, yet shifting atoms, sameness, yet incessant change, make up the monotonous medley. Woe’s me for this weary world! ’

In such feelings I think it possible that a few of my hearers may sympathize. To you it is very painful — this fugacity of time — this flight of years and ages — this coming and going of the generations. And to you it is very oppressive — this monotony of life — this constant recurrence of the same small pleasures — and this total absence of any magnificent enjoyment. You both want something of which you may say, “See, this is new,” and something of which you may feel, “Now this is good — this is noble: here is something which will never pass away: a joy that will be my comrade through eternity — for neither it nor I shall ever die.” From such vexing thoughts might you not escape by taking refuge in one permanence and one variety to which the royal Preacher does not here advert? I mean the souFs immortality, and the renewed soul’s perpetual juvenescence; that attribute of mind which makes it the survivor of all changes, and that faculty of regenerate humanity which renders old things new, and suffuses with perpetual freshness things the most familiar.

It is true that, compared with many visible objects, man is ephemeral. Compared with the sun that shines over him — the air which fans him — the ocean on which he floats, his “duration is a swift decay.” And there is much pcnsiveness in the thought of his own frailty. To look out, as we were last week looking, on the plenitude of summer, — to view the exuberance of verdure in the woods, and the soft warmth upon the waters — to inhale the fragrance of roses, mingling with earth’s ripeness, and think how soon our eyes must shut for ever on that landscape — how soon aromatic breezes and blushing

flowers shall stir no animation in our tombs, to

think that there will be as much of ecstasy in the season, but in that ecstasy we shall be no sharers; or, as the poet has expressed it in his “Farewell to the Brook,” —

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,

Thy tribute wave deliver;
No more by thee, my steps shall be,

For ever, and for ever.
But here will sigh thine alder tree,

And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee, will hum the bee,

For ever, and for ever.
A thousand suns will stream on thee,

A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee, my steps shall be,

For ever, and for ever.*

* Tennyson.

In such contemplations there is a deep pathos, and to surrender the spirit to their habitual mastery would be to live a life of constant melancholy.

But, whatever may be the sensations of worldlings, these ought not to be the feelings of Christians. Jesus Christ hath brought immortality to light through the Gospel. He has taught us that amidst all sublunary perpetuities, the most perpetual is the soul of man. He has assured us that the man who believes in Himself shall never die, and that of all things which ever tenanted this planet, the most enduring are Himself and those whom faith and affection make one with Himself; the great Alpha and Omega, and all the redeemed existence included in his own.

But more than that, have you thought, my friends, on the immortalizing faculty of your own immortal minds? The soul of man is not only earth’s true amaranth, but earth’s only antiseptic. It is only in that soul that this visible creation will by and by exist at all. It is only in your deathless memory that its fair scenes and curious objects will, ere long, survive; but there they can never die. Already the face of things has entirely changed since the days of Solomon. No limner has preserved the aspect of Palestine as his poetic father viewed it. But there are memories in which it lives. The well of Bethlehem — its streets, its houses, and its stables, as they stood a thousand years before the Saviour of the world was born in one of them; the copse where the young shepherd cut his crook, and the bazaar where he bought his harp; the slopes tufted with hyssop and elastic with thyme, where his broad-tailed flocks cropped the herbage, and the trees where they rested at noon; the muster of the Philistines on one side of the torrent, and Israel’s tents on the other — all these have vanished from under the sun, but all these are still vivid in the spectator’s strengthened memory. And there, too, are still depicted portraits which the artists of earth can only imagine; — Jesse’s manly port as, with yeoman pride, he stalked out and in among his thriving herds and soldier sons, — Samuel’s reverend visage as he poured the anointing oil, — Goliath’s mighty bulk as he fell over on the quaking turf, — Jonathan’s tearful smile as he bade farewell for that fatal Gilboa. And even so, if you be the children of God, this earth is your unfading heritage. Its best things will subsist as long as you care to preserve them. And, even after that earth and all its works, all its present features and all its present productions have disappeared, there will be as many records of creation as there are holy recollections in heaven. When the aspen and the alder, when the bee in the fox-glove, and the roses round the bower, are extinct species, or are only enshrined in the amber of celestial reminiscence; you will still remember, what like earth’s sanctuaries looked, and how its summers shone. Or should even sun and moon grow pale, their image will endure so long as you remember

£ the happy hour when you gave yourself to God: so long as you remember the mossy bank where first, in the Saviour’s invitations, you read your title to a mansion in the skies: so long as you remember the bright winter-night returning from the country communion, when the peace of God was a full tide in your bosom, and in the melting admiration of redeeming love, you looked up into the heavens and said, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Ah! yes; the immortality of material forms is the immortality of the soul of man.

And of these material forms it is the highest func - tion, — so to speak, it is their greatest privilege, to tell on man’s immortality; — to get so blended with man’s being as to survive the wreck of matter, and share that existence which alone is undissolving. And though this suggests some painful thoughts, though it is sad to think how objects of cupidity and avarice, and how the incentives to unholy passion may survive only in that self-accusing conscience which they helped to make a child of hell, boasting no monument beyond such miscreant memory: still there is a fitness, and one feels happy in the thought that God’s good works shall be eternally embalmed in those immortal natures which they have helped to make good and beautiful, and shall never die so long as those spirits live to whose growth in grace they once gave aliment. Generations will cease to come and go. The earth in its present arrangements, will not “abide for ever.” It will soon be burned up, along with all its works. Its present races will be annihilated, or only recognised as dim fossils in the calcined strata; and the very books which have been engraven and painted to represent their forms, shall perish in the mighty conflagration. But even then there will be tablets of Nature numerous as the spirits of the just made perfect; and what museums have failed to keep will be still secure in the fire-proof cabinets of saintly recollection. No eagle will then poise in the vacant firmament, but its restful gyrations, its sunward aspiring, will still be present to that mind which used to associate with it the self-renovating efforts of prayer: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up on wings as eagles.” And from another planet the pilgrim coming would vainly search for Syria’s far-famed lily: but its image still will linger both in the memory and the character or that modest disciple to whom Jesus said not in vain, “Consider the lilies, and be clothed like them.” There will then be no Jacob’s well; but its deep shaft and shady canopy will still be pictured in her memory, who, one summer afternoon, found resting there a stranger, and obtained from him water of everlasting life. And there will be no Patmos then, but its creeks and caverns will all be mapped in his affectionate fancy, who found it the open gate of the New Jerusalem; and who will recall the lizards on its cliffs and the little fishes in its pools, with Apocalyptic light and Sabbath joy around them. E 2

There is another sense in which these material agencies are working a moral progress, and so promoting the scheme of God. Looking up at the weather-cock, says the sage of vanity, “Woe’s me for this weaiy wind! There, it was south this morning, and now it is north! How many ways it blows, and never long the same! What’s the use of all this whirling?” And if it were only to make the vane spin round, the air as well might stagnate: there were no need of such wasted power. But whilst the valetudinarian is looking at the vane, the wind is careering over a continent, and doing the Creator’s work in a hundred lands. It has called at yon city, fetid with miasma and groaning with pestilence; and, with its besom of brisk pinions, it has swept the plague away. It has looked into yon haven, and found a forest of laden ships sleepingover their freights, and it has chased them all to sea. And finding the harvest arrested in a broad and fertile realm — the earth chapped, and the crops withering, — it is now hurrying with that black armament of clouds to drench it in lifesome irrigation. To narrow observation or to selfishness that wind is an annoyance: to faith it is God’s angel,* forwarding the mighty plan. ‘Tis a boisterous night, and Pictish savages curse the noisy blast which shakes their peat-hovels round their ears; but that noisy blast has landed the Gospel on St. Andrew’s shore. It blows a fearful tempest, and it sets some rheu-Ps. civ. 3, 4.

matic joints on aching; but the morrow shows dashed in pieces the awful Armada which was fetching the Spanish Inquisition to our British Isle. The wind blows east, and detains James’s ships at Harwich: but it guides King William to Torbay. Yes,, “the wind blows south and the wind blows north; it whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits.” But in the course of these circuits the wind has blown to our little speck of sea-girt Happiness, the Gospel, and Protestantism, and civil and religious liberty. And so, not of our islet only, but of our globe entire, and its continuous population. So far as the individual is concerned, so far as it affects the weather-index in the wind, there may be little seeming progress; nay, so far as concerns any plan which society proposes to itself, the favouring gale may shift and shift again, and the story of a nation be little better than the register of a stationary vane pirouetting on its windy pivot; but so far as affects the scheme of God, there is an aura in the universe which always drives one way. Predestination is a vane which never vibrates, and Providence a wind which never whirls about. The breath of God’s Spirit and the strength of God’s purpose are steadily wafting our world and all the worlds in one mighty convoy towards God’s appointed haven in the distant future. So cheer up, Solomon, and all ye sighing sages; cheer up, you that complain of the sameness and insipidity of mundane affairs. Cheer up, you that pine for some grand disclosure, and long for something that will fill your eye and satisfy your ear. When in the harbour of God’s finished mystery, the sails of history are furled, and the eternal anchor is dropped — when the last generation falls in and the last holy intelligence comes home, you who have so often asked, Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? you will see “all things made new;” you, whose eye has never been satisfied with seeing, will be satisfied when you see Him as He is; and you, whose ear was never satisfied with hearing, will long for nothing fuller when responsive to the overture which morning- stars sang so long ago, the grand finale shall burst from Infinitude exclaiming, “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb, for ever and ever.”

If, as we have said, the immortality of material forms is only that which they achieve through the immortality of the human soul; and if the true glorification of matter is its sanctifying influence on regenerate mind, we may learn two lessons from our argument:

First, that there is no harm in a vivid susceptibility of those material appearances and influences with which God has replenished the universe. Some religionists would make contempt of the creation a test of piety; but they greatly err. It was of the material universe that six times over God said that it was “good.” And it was in that material universe that the Son of God Incarnate evidently sought refreshment for his eyes when weary with viewing vanity. Yes, Jesus himself has taken to heaven some of its relics of Eden:

“Oh, Saviour, gone to God’s right hand,

Yet the same Saviour still;
Graved on Thy heart is this lovely strand
And every fragrant hill.” *

Secondly. But that susceptibility is good for nothing if it be not sanctifying. There is an idolatry of nature. There are some whose God is the visible creation, and not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And there is a voluptuousness in the enjoyment of nature. There are some to whom the landscape and its ingredients are neither the recreation fitting them for more active duties, nor the ladder of easy steps leading them up to adoring and loving thoughts of God; but, like the epicure over his viands, they sit down to the banquet as if they cared for no higher paradise. At this moment, when so many are panting for a purer air, and preparing to migrate to other scenes in search of it, it may be a word in season. Go, you that have worked hard for it — go and enjoy your holiday. But whithersoever you go, let all your religion go with you. If you go among foreigners, instead of gruffness and hauteur, take with you Christian complaisance, and do justice at once to the good * M’Cheyne’s “Sea of Galilee.”

feeling of England and the courtesy of real religion. And whether among compatriots or foreigners, take with you the Sabbath-day. Keep its hours as sacred in the hired lodging or the inn, as you keep them in your own well-ordered home. Pray for the places where you sojourn, and as seeds for the eternal harvest, it were well if you could drop some good words or arresting tracts as you pass along. And then, when bursts of beauty or surprises of grandeur come in upon your soul, let the thought also come in of your “Father,” who “made them all.” And thus associated with the profitable books you read, or the Christian inter course you enjoyed, or the efforts at usefulness you there put forth, — places which to the vacant inind recall no memories, and to the profligate are only identified with dissipation and riot, — will to you be fraught with pleasant recollections; and, thus bea tified and sanctified, the resorts and recreations of earth wrill be worthy of a mental pilgrimage even from the bowers of Paradise Restored.

July 19, 1850.