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 then 'Vanity of vanities' would be a patent misrepresentation. All is not 'vanity,' if there is in human nature a point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near, where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7b], he cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the Imitation could have written Vanitas vanitatum both on his first page and on his last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a reversal of the great charter of man's dignity in the eighth Psalm. To me, the motto simply says that all Koheleth's wanderings had but brought him back to the point from which he started. 'Grandissima vanità,' as Castelli, in his dignified Italian, puts it, 'tutto è vanità.' All that I can assign to the editors in this verse are the parenthetic words 'saith the Koheleth.' Everywhere else we find 'Koheleth;' here alone, and perhaps vii. 17 (corrected text), 'the Koheleth.'

Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.

And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man; further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search, (yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words, and he wrote down plainly words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the members of the assemblies have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given them forth from another shepherd. And as for all beyond them, my son, be warned; of making many books there is no end, and