Vanity Of Vanities

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 12:8).
 

Few things could more illustrate the breadth and comprehensiveness of Holy Scripture as great literature covering vast periods of time than the inclusion of this Book of Ecclesiastes with the general body of the Bible. The mingled plaint and protest of the closing chapters of the book together with its general materialistic tone and dismal outlook form a complete contrast to the New Testament writings.

In the records of the early Church we are impressed, if we study them, by the radiant joy, the infectious enthusiasm, the glowing hope, and the ardent love of the first disciples of the Risen Lord. Few generations, if any, have matched their sense of liberation, intoxicating rapture, and deep central bliss, and none indeed have ever surpassed it.

Why then does this ancient pessimist who was a debater and controversialist rather than a teacher, and who leaves us wondering at the measure of his faith or unfaith, have a place in the Canon of Holy Scripture? Evidently he saw life acutely - as a rule a pessimist does - but he did not see it steadily and he did not see it whole. Acute vision, if it is not accompanied by breadth, generally breeds dissatisfaction. It was said of Thackeray that he was altogether too clear and open eyed to be boisterously happy. So was it with this man, who, by the way, Thackeray loved to quote. His consciousness of the pathos of what he deemed a fruitless ending of life colored his conceptions and his language.

He would have us register the days of darkness which overshadow men and women from their birth; the sense of pain which impregnates even your deepest or highest joy. If for him these days of darkness predominated, still more did the endless night of death ever drawing nearer afflict his morbid imagination. There were no bright gleams of everlastingness on his somber landscape. Here and hereafter that landscape stretched into unknown vistas enshrouded in the mists of skepticism and dripping with the gloom of doubt.

Seldom, indeed, my brethren, is the nobler preference of belief in immortality more strikingly exhibited than in the concrete instance of the unknown author of the Book of the Ecclesiastes. He had no perspective beyond the dissolution of the body. The adamantine wall of death ran clean athwart any hopes he might otherwise have entertained. All is of the dust and to the dust returns. Men and all that men call achieve will be as though they had never been. Such is the doctrine which underlies and influences every line in this very, very able document. He was the Schopenhauer of his period. He could not accept the hope of a better existence of which the one we have now is but the prelude. Everything that he looked upon wore a cool and chill and dreary aspect. He pictures himself as a woe begone pilgrim from faint substance to absolute shadow, in a region where life paled out into an ever deepening death.

It is this future or non future, if you will, which the author of Ecclesiastes has in mind when he bids us reflect on the undesirable, miserable lot awaiting mankind in the Hades, the abode of death, which he depicts. It may not have been his intention to cheat human beings out of their present happiness, such as they may attain, by forcing them to anticipate their future misery. But he is anxious to remind them that if they spend the present wisely and according to the dictates of conscience and discretion, they may perchance - he is not sure - store up some Light which shall shine later on to cheer their entrance into the unknown.

It is his purpose, and it must be recognized apart from our theological differences with him, that at the worst virtue is always superior to vice, wisdom to folly, restraint to excess, and calm deliberation to hasty impulse. So far so good. There is nothing new in it. This has been said as he said it a thousand times by sages and seers of every civilized state since the world began. But one greatly fears that the feeble dynamic thus supplied will not accomplish much for the actual business of living as practiced by men and women who are often deeply imbedded in carnality and who find it difficult to struggle from under its super incumbent mass.

Moreover, they have their dark days and sleepless nights while life here prolongs its precious light. In truth, nature enforces this experience upon us by her ordering of the seasons. Spring today, winter yesterday. Summer will come and after summer the more peaceful atmosphere of autumn's fruitfulness. Then again, winter. When the sun is low on the horizon, when water freezes in the pail, when the aged covet the fireside nook, when night right early involves the skies - it is as though the hieroglyphics of your fate were written across the very face of creation. Other moralists, besides the one we are studying for the moment today, have dilated upon winter as symbolic of vanished hopes, failing powers, and gathering fears, figurative of discontent and of repining. Did not George Eliot, the greatest [person] in some respects of the last century, say, "The spring is coming but my eternal winter has just begun"? In saying this she expressed the deep seated view of life beneath many reflective people of a certain caste of mind and melancholy temperament, too often accompanying great intellectual gifts, which the pulpit has no right to ignore if it is a complete ministry to the needs of man.

Yet there is something else to be said concerning these matters and it is this: while winter comes and brings with it these symbols of defeated aspirations, of gathering darkness, it also brings with it the purest domestic happiness and radiates peace and satisfaction from countless hearts and homes throughout the world. As if to challenge the assumptions of the melancholy and the worldling, Christianity's most joyous festival, the great rebirth of the human heart at large, is lodged in the heart of winter and December 25 can become more holy and more beautiful than the loveliest day in May. Thus does Grace counteract Nature and teach us to look beyond her, to triumph over her, to have that independence, fortitude, and acceleration of soul which characterized the first Christians. This has never left the organic life of the Church.

Moreover, winter, though it be a stern and hard task mistress, warns us that industry and thrift have to get ready for its approach. Dwellers in temperate zones have always been more fortunate in their procession than those who dwell in the tropics. Winter teaches them how to erect dwellings against the snows and the north wind; how to arrange their cities as they do even to the very fringe of the Arctic Circle as, for example, in beautiful Stockholm, so that they shall be a defense of life in the day of emergency. Thus winter, which has taught us that there are no unbidden fruits to drop from uncultivated trees into sensual mouths in our incipient paradise, also teaches us that if we are to have a paradise here it must echo with the ring of the hammer, the roll of the wheel and the nobility of labor. So we sow that we may reap into barns. Is there any more contented being or one with more right to contentment than the man who sits with his wife and children around him in this land or any other on his own hearthstone, while the wind and sleet beat against his dwelling in vain, shut in that tumultuous privacy of the storm with his Bible and faith in God? He realizes the priesthood of the individual believer as few men can. So the course of civilization has been determined by the very things that upon surface view seem to threaten it altogether.

So dark days have their uses both for the body and the soul. When they come, as come they must either in this world or in the next - I have a theory which I think is based upon reason that those who do not know them here more frequently know them hereafter - when they come and wherever, our religion is designed to brace us, to make the meeting place well named and find in their extremities our opportunity. There are moments of suffering and bereavement experienced by some to whom I speak today which evoke all our courage and fortitude. Sometimes it seems as though we must sink beneath the weight of these burdens; there is such a sense of utter loneliness. Thank God, they do not last long. When the heavens are as brass, when the great Comrade of the soul seems to be dead, when all life is of a sable hue, then the one who has stored up within himself or herself during days of peace and tranquility spiritual resources, having done all things, can continue to stand and refuse to have his or her integrity taken away.

There are other dark days for which there is no explanation. Even in the brightest and most successful lives do they come. Their distresses haunt hearts which we suppose are basking in the sunlight of cheerful society. Nevertheless they conceal what the mystics, who are the best versed scholars in divinity, call "the dark night of the soul." Those who simply float with the flotsam and jetsam on the stream are too superficial to know these things of which I am speaking. But let me say, my brethren, that not a few of the choicest spirits that have ever walked this earth, characterized by their purity and their high minded devotion, have yet had to endure phases of inward misery and depression when faith is dumb and helpless and Divine goodness seems to be hidden.

Sometimes some creed bound bigot writes me and says, "Was Abraham Lincoln a religious man?" If any man has ever lived on this continent, who went down to the depths and ascended to the heights of all human experience in suffering, sorrow, darkness, and yet radiant hope and glory, his name was Abraham Lincoln. He would not have been nearly so great as he really was, so great indeed that many of his would be biographers leave him essentially unlimned in their feeble and pallid portraitures, had he not had the capacity to suffer beyond the ordinary. That is why he is so dear to the heart of the world; why he has ceased to be, among the very few who have thus ceased, a national property, and has become a human possession. So he makes men everywhere who are indifferent to righteousness feel that nothing is too great or too costly to bring about character, whether in the individual or the state, which survives these crucial tests of time.

So, my brethren, it would seem that this painful discipline, which the mystics called "the dark night of the soul," is necessary for those who would be princes in the Kingdom of God. If Christ is your example and mine, surely here I have a passport that you may well consider. The effort to always indulge the flesh and keep its slightest whims and emotions carefully intact or satisfied is very often vital to the deeper cultural processes which refine men and women in themselves and their spiritualities as fire refines gold and silver. I have tried to fathom the purpose of such experiences thus revealed to me by reading the pages or listening to the accounts of those who are versed in the deeper things of God. I believe that while we should do everything we can to overcome those hopeless moments when tomorrow comes back and fills us with the black waters of darkness and despair, nevertheless if we endure them and seek to find beneath the death's head cloven through, the bright angel of release, there is the secret of great spiritual development.

This was what was meant by the psalmist when he said that it was good for him that he was afflicted. "My boy died on the battlefield," said a father to me yesterday with trembling lips, "but since then I have tried to walk with God that I may be with him." A wife says, "My husband was taken away in the midst of his years, from a career full of ripe usefulness and growing service, yet since then I have felt that detachment which makes me beautifully independent of the things before." How many of our fellow men bow in prostration, as though it had any real value? So you have not only found your sweetest consolation in the moments when all seemed vanity and nothingness, you have found that God Himself drew near and the hours of gloom ushered in the pledges of relief and betterment, while friends you have never suspected were attached to you came and ministered to you, did they not, in these days of desolation, veritable angels and messengers of God, that you may know the real hope and splendor of human nature at its best?

Then there are given periods when like Elijah we may prefer death to life. The program is shattered. Environments are narrowing. The prison house seems to close with immovable walls upon our immured spirits. When a man or woman abandons the will to live the case is always serious. The Biblical phrase for that is, "He turned his face to the wall and died." In my own Pastoral experience I have noticed that so long as my beloved members of this Church keep the will to live they fight on through. But when at last I notice upon their faces a look of relinquishment and resignation, I know as the Scotch writer said, "they were for the morning."

So, my brethren, while the will to live is indeed a great and splendid instinct and bids us husband our resources, physical, mental, and moral, nevertheless the day comes, though the young people here this morning cannot conceive it, when we with joyful exaltation in our dying breath raise the Nunc dimittis: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy greatness which thou hast prepared for us, thy people." If but you say that, then the primitive dream of this writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes is as though it had never been uttered. You know he mistook the exterior for the interior and forgot that behind a frowning providence God hides a smiling face and that the threatening clouds will presently be dissolved into grateful rain as upon mown grass. You who trust in Him shall see his salvation.

What then is the general conclusion in this whole debate? Let the young people here rejoice in their youth. Do not push the chalice of its blessedness from their lips. But while you should rejoice in your youth, do not for a moment forget that it cannot last. Use it in such pursuits and accustom yourselves to such a wise husbandry of all its resources that you are not sated in superfluity and nothingness; in what is mistakenly called "modern freedom." This chatter about "freedom," if it were not tragical, would be amusing. Someone has said of the ancient Greek that he was always telling us about "freedom as a giant who dreamt of liberty while locked in the arms of a courtesan." There is a great deal in that. It applies to the modern situation. Freedom! There is no freedom until everything that you desire is at the command of virtue. Then and only then do you know what is meant by the great New Testament phrase, "the liberty of the Son of God." The dramatists proclaim Liberty. Is it liberty? Let history attest! There is but one freedom. That is the soul that is free as Christ was free when He said to the princes of this world, vanity, nothingness, and lies come now but find nothing in Me. That is the real freedom. A man here who is trampling on his selfish, vicious instincts. A woman who is suppressing her pride. That is the only genuine freedom. As the successful merchant in the days of his prosperity stores up his capital for the times he knows will come; as the wise father and parent provides in his fruitful years for old age and infirmity that he may not have to beg and be ashamed: so must we treat life. When we treat it thus, aided by Divine Grace and wisdom, we can enter the Christian estate, beyond the Old Dispensation great as it was in many ways, and find there the Light that does not fail.

St. Paul was so convinced of this that he was never so happy as when he was being beaten, bruised, assaulted, and left for dead. You could always tell when St. Paul had a good Sunday. His head was usually in bandages on Monday morning. Yet he said after all these privations and afflictions, "None of these things moved me. Neither count I my life dear unto myself." Many men are saying that. That is not extraordinary. If there were anything endangering one of their family or its protection against deep and bitter perversity, do I not know how they would plunge into the breach? So none of these things move me. I count not even my life dear if I may protect my loved ones. That is how St. Paul felt toward every man. A glorious estate, was it not? So we do not have to depend upon our own efforts. Here comes a great Guide and Teacher to our aid who tells us to pass, my children, from the rigors of the Ecclesiastes' climate to the radiance of the gospels' golden hue. You can do all things and endure through Me, for I live in you forever. I have made the vast differential, since then, life has taken upon itself meanings which are filled with glorious hope and exaltation. Now which do you prefer to believe? Will you say, I will take the view of a man who wrote nearly three thousand years ago, wearied as he was of the exotic voluptuousness of an Oriental court, in which he himself had been deeply intrigued? Will you say, I will resort to these people of the journalese tribe who have had big innings now coming to a close in this country, who tell us every man is a beast, every woman is approachable, business is saturated with rottenness, finance is debauched; that there is no honor, no justice; that politics is a bane; that high office is a game in which men are treated simply as figures upon a chessboard and be moved without any regard for the deep seated interests behind those motions of the state. Is that your verdict? If it is, then there is nothing but darkness ahead. But if you say, I believe that any race which could produce Christ, whether He came from God or from man or from both conjointly, cannot be sentenced to death or to ignominy, that is the other choice. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." That is the cry of the dying pagan. What is the cry of Christianity? "I am the Resurrection and the Life, He that believeth on Me, though he die yet shall he live." That is why Christianity is the finished work of God.