Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/301

 sorely perplexed by the ethics of inherited guilt (as had Ezekiel), how profoundly interesting must the Greek ideas of personal conscience have proved! Above all, how deeply must such an essay as Plato's Phædo have affected men who, like Qôheleth, had experienced the emptiness of an individual life, with no outlook save on a stream of humanity ever flowing in the same circle, and ever returning to the earth from whence it rose!

§ 74. If we contrast the Book of Wisdom with that of Qôheleth, we shall have an insight into these Greek influences. The Socratic identification of knowledge with virtue, of wisdom with justice, was sure to commend itself to the Hebrew mind, so long accustomed to mingle ideas of intellectual and moral excellence. Accordingly, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon makes Sophia or Wisdom the spirit of intellectual and moral power. Sophia will not enter "into a soul of evil arts", nor dwell "in a body subjected to sin". She is a "humane spirit", and stands altogether apart from and superior to that spirit (ruach) common to man and beast of which Qôheleth spoke. While we have here the humanising ideas of the Greek, ideas which found it equally hard to absorb the life of man into the general life of animals or of the physical world, Sophia is a direct rebuke to the pessimism of Qôheleth. God did not make Death, nor is He pleased with the destruction of the living. For He created all things for existence, and the races of the world are worthy to be preserved ; the poison of destruction is not in them, nor is the kingdom of Death upon earth. For justice is immortal; but impure men by deed and thought have summoned Death to themselves,