lood, precious Blood, poured out in atonement for it, and thus put
away forever in perfect righteousness.

Now may the Lord grant us to realize more fully, as we progress in our
book, the awful hopelessness that weighs on man's sad being, apart from
the blessed and infinitely gracious revelation of God.

CHAPTER VI.

Remembering how far the writer of our book excels all who have ever
come after him, in ability, wisdom, or riches, his groans of
disappointment shall have their true weight with us, and act as
lighthouse beacons, warning us from danger, or from spending the one
short fleeting life we have in treading the same profitless pathway of
groaning.

So chapter six opens, still on the same subject of wealth and its power
to bless. A sore evil, and one that weighs heavily on man, has Solomon
seen: riches, wealth, and honor, clustering thick on the head of one
person, and yet God has withheld from him the power of enjoying it all.
As our own poet, Browning, writes that apt illustration of King Saul:

"A people is thine,
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine!
High ambition, and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them all,
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature--King Saul."

So sorrowful is this in our preacher's eyes, and so thoroughly does it
bespeak a state of affairs under the sun in confusion, that Solomon
ventures the strongest possible assertion. Better, he says, an
untimely birth, that never saw light, than a thousand years twice told,
thus spent in vanity, without real good having been found. How bitter
life must show itself to lead to such an estimate! Better never to
have been born than pass through life without finding something that
can satisfy. But this is not looking at life simply in itself, for
life in itself is good, as the same poet sings:

"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water!
How good is man's life--the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

It is because man has, of all the creation of God, an awful shadow
hanging over him--"death and darkness and the tomb," with the solemn,
silent, unknown "beyond" lying