Ecclesiastes 2:1-3 I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove you with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.… Solomon had found that wisdom and knowledge are not the means by which the search after happiness is brought to a successful issue. He then resolved to try if indulgence in sensual delights would yield any lasting satisfaction. This, as he saw, was a course on which many entered, who like him desired happiness, and he would discover for himself whether or not they were any nearer the goal than he was. And so he resolved to enjoy pleasure - "to give his heart to wine," and "to lay hold of folly." Like the rich man in the parable, who said to his soul, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry," so did he address his heart, "Come, I will prove thee with mirth." He had tried wisdom, and found it fruitless for his purpose, and now would try folly. He lays aside the character and pursuits of a student, and enters the company of fools, to join in their revelry and mirth. The conviction that his learning was useless, either to satisfy his own cravings or to remedy the evils that exist in the world, made it easy for him to cast away, for a time at any rate, the intellectual employments in which he had engaged, and to live as others do who give themselves up to sensual pleasures. Wearied of the toil of thought, sickened of its illusions and of its fruitlessness, he would find tranquility and health of mind in frivolous gaiety and mirth. This was not an attempt to stifle his cravings after the highest good, for he deliberately determined to analyze his experience at every point, in order to discover whether any permanent gain resulted from his search in this new quarter. "I sought," he says, "in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life." For the sake of others as well as for himself, he would try this pathway and see whither it would lead. But the experiment failed. In a very short time he discovered that vanity was here too. The laughter of fools was, as he says elsewhere (Ecclesiastes 7:6), like the crackling of burning thorns; the blaze lasted but for a moment, and the gloom that followed was but the deeper and more enduring. Where the fire of jovial revelry and boisterous mirth had been, there remained but cold, gray ashes. The mood of reckless enjoyment was followed by that of cynical satiety and bitter disappointment. He said of laughter, "It is mad," and of mirth, "What doeth it?" In his moments of calm reflection, when he communed with his own heart, he recognized the utter folly of his experiment, and felt that from his own dear-bought experience he could emphatically warn all in time to come against seeking satisfaction for the soul in sensual pleasures. Not in this way can the hunger and thirst with which the spirit of man is consumed be allayed. At most, a short period of oblivion can be secured, from which the awakening is all the more terrible. The sense of personal responsibility, the feeling that we are called to seek the highest good and are doomed to unrest and misery until we find it, the conviction that our failures only make ultimate success the more doubtful, is not to be quenched by any such coarse anodyne. Various reasons may be found to explain why this kind of experiment failed and must fail. I. In the first place, it consisted in AN ABUSE OF NATURAL FACULTIES AND APPETITES. Some measure of joy and pleasure is needed for health of mind and body. Innocent gaiety, enjoyment of the gifts God has bestowed upon us, reasonable satisfaction of the appetites implanted in us, have all a rightful place in our life. But over-indulgence in any one of them violates the harmony of our nature. They were never intended to rule us, but to be under our control and to minister to our happiness, and we cannot allow them to govern us without throwing our whole life into disorder. II. In the second place, THE PLEASURE EXCITED IS ONLY TRANSITORY. From the very nature of things it cannot be kept up for any long time by mere effort of will; the brain grows weary and the bodily powers become exhausted. A jest-book is proverbially very tiresome reading. At first it may amuse, but the attention soon begins to flag, and after a little the most brilliant specimen of wit can scarcely evoke a smile. The drunkard and the glutton find that they can only carry the pleasures of the table up to a certain point; after that has been reached the bodily organism refuses to be still further stimulated. III. In the third place, SUCH PLEASURE CAN ONLY BE GRATIFIED BY SELF-DEGRADATION. It is inconsistent with the full exercise of the intellectual faculties which distinguish man from the brute, and destructive of those higher and more spiritual faculties by which God is apprehended, served, and enjoyed. Self-indulgence in the gross pleasures of which we are speaking actually reduces man below the level of the beasts that perish, for they are preserved from such folly by the natural instincts with which they are endowed. IV. In the fourth place, THE INEVITABLE RESULT OF SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IS A DEEPER AND MORE ENDURING GLOOM. Self-reproach, enfeeblement of mind and body, satiety and disgust, come on when the mad fit is past, and, what is still worse, the apprehension of evils yet to come - the knowledge that the passions excited and indulged will refuse to die down; that they have a life and power of their own, and will stimulate and almost compel their slave to enter again on the evil courses which he first tried of his own free will and with a light heart. The prospect before him is that of bondage to habits which he knows will yield him no lasting pleasure, and very little of the fleeting kind, and must involve the enfeeblement and destruction of all his powers. Mirth and laughter and wine did not banish Solomon's melancholy; but after the feverish excitement they produced had passed away, they left him in a deeper gloom than ever. "Like phosphorus on a dead man's lace, he felt that it was all a trick, a lie; and like the laugh of a hyena among the tombs, he found that the worldling's frolic can never reanimate the joys which guilt has slain and buried." "I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?' The well-known story of the melancholy patient being advised by a doctor to go and see Grimaldi, and answering, "I am Grimaldi," and that of George Fox being recommended by a minister whom he consulted to dispel the anxieties which his spiritual fears and doubts and aspirations had excited within him, by "drinking beer and dancing with the girls" (Carlyle, 'Sartor Resartus,' 3:1), may be used to illustrate the teaching of our text. Some stanzas, too, of Byron's last poem give a pathetic expression to the feelings of satiety and disappointment which are the retribution of sensuality ? "My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone! "The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze - A funeral pile. "The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of love I cannot share, But wear the chain." - J.W. Parallel Verses KJV: I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. |
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