is a picture here well worth looking at
attentively. Regard him: noble in every sense of the word,--with
clearest intellect, with the loftiest elevation of thought, with an
absolutely true conception of the existence of God. Who amongst men,
let thought sweep as wide as it will amongst the children of Adam, can
go or has gone, beyond him? What can man's mind conceive, he may ask,
as well as man's hand do, that cometh after the King? Yea, let our
minds go over all the combined wisdom of all the ages amongst the wise
of the world, and where will you find a loftier, purer, truer
conception of God, and the becoming attitude of the creature in
approaching Him than here? For he is not a heathen, as we speak, this
Solomon. He has all that man, as man, could possibly have; and that
surely includes the knowledge of the existence of God,--His power
eternal, and His Godhead, as Romans i. clearly shows. The heathen
themselves have lapsed from that knowledge. "_When they knew God_" is
the intensely significant word of Scripture. This is, indeed,
diametrically contrary to the teaching of modern science--that the
barbarous and debased tribes of earth are only in a less developed
condition--are on the way _upward_ from the lowest forms of life, from
the protoplasm whence all sprang, and have already passed in their
upward course the ape, whose likeness they still, however, more closely
bear! Oh, the folly of earth's wisdom! The pitiful meanness and
littleness of the greatest of modern scientific minds that have "come
after the King" contrasted even with the grand simple sublimity of the
knowledge of Ecclesiastes. For this Preacher would not be a proper
representative _man_ were he in debased heathen ignorance. He could
not show us faithfully and truly how far even unaided human reason
could go in its recognition of, and approach to, God, if he had lost
the knowledge of God. Low, indeed, is the level of man's highest, when
in this state, as the Greeks show us; for whilst they, as distinct from
the Jews, made wisdom the very object of their search, downward ever do
they sink in their struggles, like a drowning man, till they reach a
foul, impure, diabolical mythology. Their gods are as the stars for
multitude. Nor are they able to conceive of these except as influenced
by the same passions as themselves. Is there any reverence in approach
to such? Not at all. Low, sensual, earthly depravity marked ever that
approach. T