Educate and
cultivate your own minds. Live, as far as you can, a free, reasonable,
cheerful, happy life, enjoying this world, if you feel able to enjoy it.
But know thou, that for all these things, God will bring thee into
judgment.

Ah! say some, there is the sting. How can we enjoy ourselves if we are
to be brought into judgment after all?

My friends, before I answer that question, let me ask one. Do you look
on God as a taskmaster, requiring of you, as the Egyptians did of the
Jews, to make bricks all day without straw, and noting down secretly
every moment that you take your eyes off your work, that He may punish
you for it years hence when you have forgotten it--extreme to mark what
is done amiss?

Or do you look on God as a Father who rejoices in the happiness of His
children?--Who sets them no work to do but what is good for them, and
requires them to do nothing without giving them first the power and the
means to do it?--A Father who knows our necessities before we ask for
help and a Saviour who is able and willing to give us help? If you think
of God in that former way as a stern taskmaster, I can tell you nothing
about Him. I know Him not; I find Him neither in the Bible, in the
world, nor in my own conscience and reason. He is not the God of the
Bible, the God of the Gospel whom I am commanded to preach to you.

But if you think of God as a Father, as your Father in heaven, who
chastens you in His love that you may partake of His holiness, and of His
Son Jesus Christ as your Saviour, your Lord, who loves you, and desires
your salvation, body and soul--of Him I can speak; for He is the True and
only God, revealed by His Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and in His light I
can tell you to rejoice and take comfort, ever though He brings you into
judgment; for being your Father in heaven, He can mean nothing but your
good, and He would not bring you into judgment if that too was not good
for you.

Now, you must remember that the judgment of which Solomon speaks here is
a judgment in _this_ life. The whole Book of Ecclesiastes, from which
the text is taken, is about _this_ life. Solomon says so specially, and
carefully. He is giving here advice to his son; and his doctrine all
through is, that a man's happiness or misery in _this_ life, his good or
bad fortune in _this_ life, depend almost entirely on his own conduct;
and, above all, on his conduct in youth. As a man sows he shall reap, is
his doctrine.