Page:Job and Solomon (1887).djvu/230

 [** I do not recommend this page for the faint-of-heart. Greek, Latin, Syriac/Hebrew all lurk within the footnote. I hope I got close. Good luck!]

do is to accustom yourself to acquiesce in destiny: you will then see that every act and every state in your ever-shifting life is truly beautiful or seemly (iii. 11), even if not profitable to the individual (iii. 9). More than this, man has been endowed with the faculty of understanding this kaleidoscopic world, with the drawback that he cannot possibly embrace it all in one view:—

Also he hath put the world into their heart (i.e. mind), except that man cannot find out from beginning to end the work which God hath made (iii. 11).

In fact, to quote Lord Bacon's words in the Advancement of Learning, 'God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe, and desirous to receive it, as the eye to receive the light.' But here a dark mood interrupts the course of our author's meditations; or perhaps it is the record of a later period which is but awkwardly attached to the previous passages. 'To rejoice and to fare well'—sensual (or, let us say, sensuous) pleasure, in short—is now represented as the only good for man, and even that is not to bein Eph. ii. 2)? (2) 'Also he has put eternity into their heart, but so that man cannot' &c. So Ginsburg and Delitzsch (desiderium æternitatis, taking 'eternity' in a metaphysical sense = 'that which is beyond time'); so also Nowack (taking it in the popular sense of years following upon years without apparent limit). Ginsburg's view is against the context, in which the continuance of the human spirit is doubted; but Nowack's explanation is not unacceptable. Man has been enabled to form the idea of Time (for the popular view of 'eternity' comes practically to this), and has divided this long space into longer and shorter periods; what happens in one period or season, he can compare with what happens in another, thus finding all well-adapted and 'beautiful.' But he cannot grasp the whole of Time in one view. But I still prefer the explanation given in the text, as being simpler, in spite of the fact that 'ōlām nowhere else occurs in the sense of 'world' (or the present order of things), so common in later Hebrew.]