this line. We will now ask our learned friends, since
Solomon has been so conclusively proved not to have written it, Who
did? And when was it written? Ah, now we may listen to a very medley
of answers!--for opinions here are almost as numerous as the critics
themselves. United in the one assurance that Solomon could not have
written it, they are united in nothing else. One is assured it was
Hezekiah, another is confident it was Zerubbabel, a third is convinced
it was Jesus the son of Joiada--and so on. "All opinions," as Dr.
Lewis says, "are held with equal confidence, and yet in every way are
opposed to each other. Once set it loose from the Solomon time, and
there is no other place where it can be securely anchored."

This brings us then to the positive assertion that from the evident
purpose of the book, the _divine_ purpose, no other than Solomon could
be its author. He must be of a nation taken out of the darkness and
abominations of heathendom;--there was only one such nation,--he must
then be an _Israelite_. He must live at an epoch when that nation is
at the summit of its prosperity;--it never regained that epoch,--he
must then have lived _when_ Solomon lived. He must, in his own person,
by his riches, honor, wisdom, learning, freedom from external political
fears, perfect capacity to drink of whatever cup this world can put
into his hand to the full--represent the very top-stone of that
glorious time; and not one amongst all the sons of men answers to all
this but _Solomon the son of David, king in Jerusalem_.

To Him who is "greater than Solomon"--to Him who is "above the sun"--to
Him whom it is the divine purpose of the book to highly exalt above
all--would I commit this feeblest effort to show that purpose, and, as
His condescending grace permits, further it. F. C. J.

OLD GROANS AND NEW SONGS;

OR,

_MEDITATIONS ON ECCLESIASTES._

Perhaps there is no book within the whole canon of Scripture so
perplexing and anomalous, at first sight, as that entitled
"Ecclesiastes." Its terrible hopelessness, its bold expression of
those difficulties with which man is surrounded on every side, the
apparent fruitlessness of its quest after good, the unsatisfactory
character, from a Christian standpoint, of its conclusion: all these
points have made it, at one and the same time, an enigma to the
superficial student of the Word, and the arsenal whence a far more
superficial infidelity has soug