XI.

LIFE WEARINESS.

Eccles. i. 2: "VANITY OF VANITIES, SAITH THE PREACHER; VANITY OF VANITIES; ALL IS VANITY.”

То

O one man, every thing is vanity; to another, nothing. To Solomon, satiated with pleasure, the world seemed very empty; but to every earnest man and woman it is very full and significant. Scepticism finds no meaning in life; but faith, hope, and love find life very full of meaning. We are all of us sometimes like King Solomon, and say, "All is vanity;" but we are also all of us sometimes like Paul, and say, "All things work together for good to those who love God." In other words, life seems very empty and very weary to those who live one way; but very rich, full, and significant to those who live in another way.

I know no greater misery than this condition of life-weariness. It is not a very uncommon state of mind. It happens more often with the young than with older persons. They are tired of life before they have begun to live. Such is the state of the

present generation.

They are "born fatigued," as some one says. Children in their early teens write verses, in which they declare themselves to have exhausted life. They have seen every thing, and nothing is of value. "Omnia fui, nihil expedit," as a Roman emperor said. They have just come to the feast, and are already satisfied.

The pretence, the affectation, the assumption, of this state of mind is ridiculous enough; but sometimes it is considered a religious duty to take no interest in any thing. A Christian, it is supposed, ought not to care for any thing but the world to come. He should abstract himself from this life and all its interests, and think only of death and eternity. This theory of Christianity seems to assume that God did not make this world; that God is not in it; that there is no such thing as Providence arranging life, and guiding it. For if this world is God's world; if God is in it, around us, above us, beneath, within, then life, the present life, being full of God, is the life eternal. Then he who despises it despises God. Such is the impiety belonging to all forms of monastic religion; to the monasticism of Protestantism, no less than that of Catholicism. A Catholic monk may live apart from the world, and yet not despise it: but how many Protestants there are, believing themselves pious because they look with austere eyes on all the joy and activity of the world; on all the gayety of youth; on all the glory of nature, the beauty of art, the achievements of genius; on

all the humble pleasures of the uneducated but honest children of God, who receive life as a gift from his hands not to be despised! Because Solomon, blasé with pleasure, a mere voluptuary, a selfindulgent man of the world, heaping up knowledge simply for his own enjoyment, because he found

life at last empty, therefore it is supposed to be the duty of Christian men and women to despise this great gift of God to us all.

Sometimes also it is thought to be very sagacious to be cynical, and to sneer at life as stale, flat, and unprofitable. A person takes a position of superiority, as though he was acquainted with many worlds, and, on the whole, thought this a poor one. To despise the world is taken as a proof that one knows the world very well. Therefore certain persons indulge themselves in an amiable misanthropy. They are very good and kind at heart; but they love to talk of the degeneracy of the times, to say that the former days were better than these, to declare the world going to decay. I rode to town last summer, sitting fifteen minutes by the side of one of these gentlemen; and I was told more about the desperate state of the times than I had learned in ten years before. He told me that there was no virtue in public men now, no knowledge in scholars, no taste in writers, no piety or capacity in preachers, no good anywhere. I told him that there was comfort then; that such a desperate state of things must be the sign of Christ's coming. He thought not: he thought Christ would

not condescend to come to a generation that had deserted all the old conservative landmarks, as this had done. So differently do we see things! I had lived among those whose faces were to the future; who saw the mighty rose of dawn in the eastern sky, like the face of God himself; and who thanked God every day for being permitted to live in such a time. Meanwhile my conservative neighbor was looking the other way into the departing night, and grieving for the secession of the owls and bats.

What makes life seem empty? and what, on the other hand, makes it seem rich and full?

Genius, the universal artist, has painted four pictures of this disease of life-weariness, and hung them in the galleries of human thought, to warn us for ever of the dangers that lie in this direction of intel lectual despair.

First, The genius of inspiration has painted for us, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the portrait of Solomon, as the first type of this terrible disease. The book of Ecclesiastes is full of this dreary scepticism. Solomon had tried every thing,-riches, power, pleasure, knowledge, and found them all vanity; and so he went about to despair of all his labor which he had taken under the sun. Why? Because of his gigantic egotism; because he had made himself the' centre of all things; because he had brought every thing — wealth, knowledge, pleasure — to Solomon to try; because he had considered the world made for him, instead of considering himself made for the

world. Therefore this desperate gloom, this black darkness of doubt. For it is with us in life as with the systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus. Consider your own earth in the middle of the universe, and regard all the suns, planets, and stars as moving around you as their centre, and the most inextrica ble confusion results. There is only an unmeaning going forward and backward among the planets, endless tangles of curves, without object and without result. But go out of this subjective theory, identify yourself with universal law, conceive of the sun as the centre, and your planet, as well as others, to go round it, and all becomes fair and lovely in the planetary movements; all is full of charm, and a divine order reigns in the deep heavens. So when we put ourselves morally in the centre of things, and consider every thing meant to revolve round us, all is confusion in the moral world; and not till we make God the centre, and follow his attraction in our orbit of obedience and faith, does order arise out of the seeming contradictions of our life.

I consider, therefore, the book of Ecclesiastes as an inspired picture of a great scepticism, born of a great self-seeking.

A second picture is given us by Shakespeare in "Hamlet." That wonderful master has shown his knowledge of human nature in nothing more than in being able to project himself out of his own time, which was one of action and endeavor, into an age not yet arrived, in which thought was in excess over