Kohelet 4

one who addresses an assembly 

1 So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.

Where they do not deny God altogether, they deny that His face is averted, and speak of His moral government, and of compensations and of Nemesis and all the rest; by which they mean that things are pretty right at the bottom, however rough they may be on the surface; that injustices are avenged in the working out of things in the long run, and the tears of the oppressed are wiped away somehow; that, take it all in all, it is a good sort of a world in which all things come to a level; that in brief, all is not vanity and fatuity, but all is conducive to ultimate good in some way or other.

Such a view will be found thoroughly artificial.

Experience will contradict it at every step and in every phase. It will be found at the last, and in the solitude of every mans actual individual experience if his range of knowledge be sufficiently wide, that Solomons picture is the true one; that life as it now is among the ...inhabitants of the earth is a welter and a turmoil with no issue and no incentive that adequately appeals to the aspirations that slumber dimly in the human breast.

It remains for us but to ask why? and how long?

These questions we ask in vain at every source but one. The Bible only tells us that the misery of man which is great upon him is the result of a break in his relations with God. Man is made for the glory of God. At the very start he refused his mission; and the refusal has been perpetuated in all the lines of his generation. In such a state of things it cannot be that God should openly manifest Himself to man and guide his affairs for him.

The law of Moses is an elaborate inculcation of this in all its ritual. Man is cast off and left to take care of himself. God has suffered all nations to walk in their own ways (Acts 14:16). They are dreadful ways, as all history shows, where no light from God has come to bear. The spectacle may distress; the theory may appal; but such are the facts, and such is their Bible explanation. What other is there?

Seasons 2.1.