The Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Groans and New Songs, by F. C. Jennings

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Title: Old Groans and New Songs
Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes

Author: F. C. Jennings

Release Date: September 13, 2009 [EBook #29971]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD GROANS AND NEW SONGS ***

Produced by Al Haines

OLD GROANS

AND

NEW SONGS

BEING

Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes

by

F. C. JENNINGS,

NEW YORK.

Glasgow:

PICKERING & INGLIS, PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS,

The Publishing Office, 73 Bothwell Street.

LONDON:

S. BAGSTER & SONS, LTD., 15 Paternoster Row, E.C

1920

PREFACE.

The chief object of a word of preface to the following notes is that
the reader may not expect from them more, or other, than is intended.
They are the result of meditations--not so much of a critical as a
devotional character--on the book, in the regular course of private
morning readings of the Scriptures--meditations which were jotted down
at the time, and the refreshment and blessing derived from which, I
desired to share with my fellow-believers. Some salient point of each
chapter has been taken and used as illustrative of what is conceived as
the purpose of the book. As month by month passed, however, the
subject opened up to such a degree that at the end, one felt as if
there were a distinct need entirely to re-write the earlier chapters.
It is, however, sent forth in the same shape as originally written; the
reader then may accompany the writer, and share with him the delight at
the ever-new beauties in the landscape that each turn of the road, as
it were, unexpectedly laid out before him.

There is one point, however, that it may be well to look at here a
little more closely and carefully than has been done in the body of the
book, both on account of its importance and of the strong attack that
the ecclesiastical infidelity of the day has made upon it: I refer to
its authorship.

To commence with the strongest position of the attack on the Solomon
authorship--necessarily the strongest, for it is directly in the field
of verbal criti