Ecclesiastes 12:12
And by these, my son, be further warned: There is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body.
Sermons
BooksT. De Witt Talmage.Ecclesiastes 12:12
The Scholar's SorrowD. Thomas Ecclesiastes 12:12
The EpilogueJ. Willcock Ecclesiastes 12:8-12
The Function of the TeacherW. Clarkson Ecclesiastes 12:9-12














In these closing paragraphs of his treatise the writer reveals his own feelings, and draws upon his own experience. It is interesting to observe how largely study was pursued and literature cultivated at the remote period when this book was written; and it is obvious to remark how far more strikingly these reflections apply to an age like our own, and to a state of society such as that in which we live. The diffusion of education tends to the multiplication of books and to the increase of the learned professions; whilst growing civilization fosters the habit of introspection, and consequently of that melancholy whose earlier and simpler symptoms are observable in the language of this touching passage.

I. STUDY AND LITERATURE ARE A NECESSITY OF EDUCATED HUMAN NATURE. As soon as men begin to reflect, they begin to embody their reflections in a literary form, whether of poetry or of prose. A native impulse to verbal expression of thought and feeling, or the desire of sympathy and applause, or the calculating regard for maintenance, leads to the devotion of ever-growing bodies of men to the literary life. Literature is an unmistakable "note" of human culture.

II. STUDY AND LITERATURE ARE, BROADLY SPEAKING, PROMOTIVE OF THE GENERAL GOOD. The few toil that the many may profit. Knowledge, thought, art, right feeling, liberty, and peace, are all indebted to the great thinkers and authors whose names are held in honor among men. Doubtless there are those who misuse their gifts, who by their writings pander to vice, incite to crime, and encourage irreligion. But the bulk of literature, proceeding from the better class of minds, is rather contributive to the furtherance of goodness and of the best interests of men. Books are among the greatest of human blessings.

III. STUDY AND LITERATURE HAVE BEEN CONSECRATED TO THE SERVICE OF RELIGION. We have but to refer to the Hebrew Scriptures themselves in proof of this. There is nothing more marvelous in history than the production of the Books of Moses, the Psalms, and the prophetic writings, at the epochs from which they date. Lawgivers, seers, psalmists, and sages live yet in their peerless writings; some of them inimitable in literary form, all of them instinct with moral power. The New Testament furnishes a yet more marvelous illustration of the place which literature holds in the religious life of humanity. Men have sneered at the supposition that a book revelation could be possible; but their sneers are answered by the facts. Whatever view we take of inspiration, we are constrained to allow for human gifts of authorship. To make up the sacred volume there are "many books," and every one of them is the fruit of "much study."

IV. STUDY AND LITERATURE ARE CULTIVATED AT THE EXPENSE OF THE EXHAUSTION AND SORROW OF THE PRODUCER AND STUDENT.

1. There is weariness of the flesh arising from the close connection between body and mind. The brain, being the central physical organ of language, is, in a sense, the instrument of thought; and, consequently, brain-weariness, nerve-exhaustion, are familiar symptoms among the ardent students to whom we are all indebted for the discovery, the formulation, and the communication of truth and knowledge.

2. But there is a mental sorrow and distress which deeper thinkers cannot always escape, and by which some among them are oppressed. The vast range of what in itself can be known is such as to strike the mind with dismay. Science, history, philosophy, etc., have made progress so marvelous, that no single finite mind can embrace, in the course of a life of study, however assiduous, more than a minute department, so as to know all of it that may be known; and a highly educated man Is content "to know something of everything, and every thing of-something.

3. Then beyond the realm accessible to human inquiry lies the vaster realm of what cannot be known - what is altogether outside our ken.

4. It must be borne in mind, further, that, whilst man's intellect is limited, his spiritual yearnings are insatiable: no bounds can be set to his aspirations; his nature is akin to that of God himself, Thus it is that sorrow often shades the scholar's brow, and that to the weariness of the flesh there is added the sadness of the spirit, that finds, in the memorable language of Pascal, the larger the circle of the known, the vaster is the circumference of the unknown that stretches beyond. - T.

Of making many books there is no end.
If true so many years before Christ, how much more true so many years A.D.! We so often see books, we have no appreciation of what a book is. It took all civilizations, all martyr fires, all battles, all victories, all defeats, all glooms, all brightness, all centuries to make one book possible. A book; the chorus of the ages; it is the drawing-room in which kings and queens, and philosophers and poets, and orators and rhetoricians came forth to meet If I burned incense to any idol I would build an altar before a book. Thank God for books — good books, healthful books, books of men, books of women — above all, for the Book of God. "Of making many books there is no end." The printing press is the mightiest agency for good or evil. I have an idea that it is to be the chief agency for the rescue and evangelization of the world, and that the last great battle will not be fought with guns and swords, but with types and presses, a gospelized printing press triumphing over and trampling under foot and crushing out a pernicious literature. You must apply the same law to the book and the newspaper. The newspaper is a book swifter and in more portable shape. Under pernicious books and newspapers tens of thousands have gone down. The plague is nothing to it. That counts its victims by the thou- sands; this modern pest shovels its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. Is there anything that I can do to help stem this mighty torrent of pernicious literature? Yes. The first thing for us all to do is to keep ourselves and our families aloof from iniquitous books and newspapers. If you ask me to-day is there anything we can do to stem this tide, I say yes, very much every way. First we will stand aloof from all books that give false pictures of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels nor fairies. Judging, however, from much of the literature of this day, we would come to the idea that life is a fitful, fantastic and extravagant thing, instead of a practical and useful thing. Those women who are indiscriminate readers of novels are unfit for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter, the duties of home life, the duties of a Christian life. We will also help to stem the tide of pernicious literature by standing aloof, we and our families, from books which have some good but a large admixture of evil. I do not care how good you are, you cannot afford to read a bad book. You say, "The influence is insignificant." Ah! the scratch of a pin may produce the lockjaw. You out of curiosity plunge into a bad book, and you have the curiosity of a man who takes a torch into a gunpowder mill to see whether or not it will blow up. If you want to help stem the tide of pernicious literature you and your families must also stand back from books which corrupt the imagination. In the name of God, I warn some of you that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and if the evil be unarrested, there will be the funeral of the body, the funeral of the mind, and the funeral of the soul — three funerals in one day. If you want to help stem this tide keep aloof, you and your families, from all books that are apologetic for crime. Many of the fascinations of book-binding are thrown around sin. Vice is horrible anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in the darkness. Paint it as writhing in the horrors of a city hospital. Cursed are the books which make impurity decent, and crime honourable, and hypocrisy noble. I mast in this connection call to your mind the iniquitous pictorials of our time. For good pictures I have great admiration. An artist with one flash will do that which an author can accomplish in four hundred pages. Fine paintings are the aristocracy of art. Engravings are the democracy of art. A good picture on one side of a pictorial will sometimes do just as much good as a book of four or five hundred pages. But you know our cities are to-day cursed with evil pictorials. These death-warrants are on every street. A young man purchases perhaps one copy, and he purchases it with his eternal discomfiture. That one bad picture poisons one soul, that soul poisons fifty souls, the fifty despoil a hundred, the hundred a thousand, the thousand a million, and the millions other millions, until it will take the measuring line of eternity to tell the height, and the depth, and the ghastliness of the great misdoing. Remember that one column of good reading may save a soul, that one column of bad reading may destroy a soul. Years ago, a clergyman passing along through the west stopped at an hotel and saw a woman copying from a book. He found the book was Doddridge's "Rise and Progress." This woman had been pleased with the book, which she had borrowed, and was copying a passage that impressed her very much. The clergyman happened to have a copy of Doddridge's "Rise and Progress" in his valise, and gave it to her. Thirty years passed along, and that clergyman came to the same hotel and was inquiring about the family that had lived there thirty years before, and was pointed to a house near by. He went there and said to the woman, "Do you remember seeing me before?" She said, "I don't remember ever to have seen you before." "Don't you remember thirty years ago a man giving you a copy of Doddridge's 'Rise and Progres '? Oh, yes, I remember that; that saved my soul, that book. I lent it to my neighbours and they read it, and they all came into the Church, and we had a great revival. Do you see the spire of a church out yonder? That church was built as a consequence of that book." Oh, the power of a good book! Oh, the power of a bad book! Crowd your minds with good books, and there will be no room for the bad. The bushel full of the wheat, where can you put in the chaff?

(T. De Witt Talmage.)

People
Solomon
Places
Jerusalem
Topics
Addition, Admonished, Anything, Besides, Beware, Beyond, Body, Books, Devotion, Endless, Excessive, Flesh, Further, Furthermore, Learning, Making, Note, Study, Warned, Wearies, Weariness, Wearying, Writing
Outline
1. the Creator is to be remembered in due time
8. The preacher's care to edify
13. the fear of God is the chief antidote for vanity

Dictionary of Bible Themes
Ecclesiastes 12:12

     5232   book
     5387   leisure, pastimes
     5582   tiredness
     5781   affection
     5894   intelligence

Ecclesiastes 12:9-12

     5441   philosophy
     8674   study

Ecclesiastes 12:11-12

     5028   knowledge, God source of human
     7797   teaching

Library
The Conclusion of the Matter
'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; 2. While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain; 3. In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, 4. And the doors shall be shut in
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture

The Work of Our Sanctification.
How much more easily sanctity appears when regarded from this point of view. If the work of our sanctification presents, apparently, the most insurmountable difficulties, it is because we do not know how to form a just idea of it. In reality sanctity can be reduced to one single practice, fidelity to the duties appointed by God. Now this fidelity is equally within each one's power whether in its active practice, or passive exercise. The active practice of fidelity consists in accomplishing the duties
Jean-Pierre de Caussade—Abandonment to Divine Providence

Circumstances and Consequences
And fears shall be in the way.' (Ecclesiastes xii. 5.) The man who wrote these words was specially emphasizing the importance of settling one's relationships to the great Creator before the coming of days when infirmities increase, and decay of natural powers sets in. The practical outcome of that thought is, that postponement only adds to one's difficulties when the battle really has to be fought. Amongst those difficulties the sacred writer places that natural foreboding, physical shrinking
T. H. Howard—Standards of Life and Service

The Ancestral Home
John Van Nest Talmage was born at Somerville, New Jersey, August 18, 1819 He was the fourth son in a family of seven brothers and five sisters. The roots of the Talmage genealogical tree may be traced back to the year 1630, when Enos and Thomas Talmage, the progenitors of the Talmage family in North America, landed at Charlestown, Massachusetts, and afterwards settled at East Hampton, Long Island. Dr. Lyman Beecher represents the first settlers of East Hampton as "men resolute, enterprising, acquainted
Rev. John Gerardus Fagg—Forty Years in South China

Letter cxxvi. To Marcellinus and Anapsychia.
Marcellinus, a Roman official of high rank, and Anapsychia his wife had written to Jerome from Africa to ask him his opinion on the vexed question of the origin of the soul. Jerome in his reply briefly enumerates the several views that have been held on the subject. For fuller information he refers his questioners to his treatise against Rufinus and also to their bishop Augustin who will, he says, explain the matter to them by word of mouth. Although it hardly appears in this letter Jerome is a decided
St. Jerome—The Principal Works of St. Jerome

Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ.
"When Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, He said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God."--Mark xii. 34. The answer of the scribe, which our blessed Lord here commends, was occasioned by Christ's setting before him the two great commandments of the Law. When He had declared the love of God and of man to comprehend our whole duty, the scribe said, "Master, Thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but He: and to love Him with all the heart, and with
John Henry Newman—Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII

The Abrogation of the Saybrook Platform
That house cannot stand.--Mark iii, 25. The times change and we change with them.--Proverb. The omission of all persecuting acts from the revision of the laws in 1750 was evidence that the worst features of the great schism were passing, that public opinion as a whole had grown averse to any great severity toward the Separatists as dissenters. But the continuance in the revised statutes of the Saybrook Platform as the legalized constitution of the "Presbyterian, Congregational or Consociated Church,"
M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.—The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut

A Treatise of the Fear of God;
SHOWING WHAT IT IS, AND HOW DISTINGUISHED FROM THAT WHICH IS NOT SO. ALSO, WHENCE IT COMES; WHO HAS IT; WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS; AND WHAT THE PRIVILEGES OF THOSE THAT HAVE IT IN THEIR HEARTS. London: Printed for N. Ponder, at the Peacock in the Poultry, over against the Stocks market: 1679. ADVERTISEMENT BY THE EDITOR. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," and "a fountain of life"--the foundation on which all wisdom rests, as well as the source from whence it emanates. Upon a principle
John Bunyan—The Works of John Bunyan Volumes 1-3

1 to Pray Does not Imply that Without Prayer God Would not Give us Anything...
1. To pray does not imply that without prayer God would not give us anything or that He would be unaware of our needs, but it has this great advantage, that in the attitude of prayer the soul is best fitted to receive the Giver of blessing as well as those blessings He desires to bestow. Thus it was that the fullness of the Spirit was not poured out upon the Apostles on the first day, but after ten days of special preparation. If a blessing were conferred upon one without a special readiness for
Sadhu Sundar Singh—At The Master's Feet

The Fifth Commandment
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.' Exod 20: 12. Having done with the first table, I am next to speak of the duties of the second table. The commandments may be likened to Jacob's ladder: the first table respects God, and is the top of the ladder that reaches to heaven; the second respects superiors and inferiors, and is the foot of the ladder that rests on the earth. By the first table, we walk religiously towards God; by
Thomas Watson—The Ten Commandments

Appendix v. Rabbinic Theology and Literature
1. The Traditional Law. - The brief account given in vol. i. p. 100, of the character and authority claimed for the traditional law may here be supplemented by a chronological arrangement of the Halakhoth in the order of their supposed introduction or promulgation. In the first class, or Halakhoth of Moses from Sinai,' tradition enumerates fifty-five, [6370] which may be thus designated: religio-agrarian, four; [6371] ritual, including questions about clean and unclean,' twenty-three; [6372] concerning
Alfred Edersheim—The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah

A Prayer when one Begins to be Sick.
O most righteous Judge, yet in Jesus Christ my gracious Father! I, wretched sinner, do here return unto thee, though driven with pain and sickness, like the prodigal child with want and hunger. I acknowledge that this sickness and pain comes not by blind chance or fortune, but by thy divine providence and special appointment. It is the stroke of thy heavy hand, which my sins have justly deserved; and the things that I feared are now fallen upon me (Job iii. 25.) Yet do I well perceive that in wrath
Lewis Bayly—The Practice of Piety

The Christian Man
Scripture references: Genesis 1:26-28; 2:7; 9:6; Job 33:4; Psalm 100:3; 8:4-9; Ecclesiastes 7:29; Acts 17:26-28; 1 Corinthians 11:7; Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Hebrews 2:6,7; Ephesians 6:10-18; 1 Corinthians 2:9. WHAT IS MAN? What Shall We Think of Man?--Who is he? What is his place on the earth and in the universe? What is his destiny? He is of necessity an object of thought. He is the subject of natural laws, instincts and passions. How far is he free; how far bound?
Henry T. Sell—Studies in the Life of the Christian

The Heavenly Footman; Or, a Description of the Man that Gets to Heaven:
TOGETHER WITH THE WAY HE RUNS IN, THE MARKS HE GOES BY; ALSO, SOME DIRECTIONS HOW TO RUN SO AS TO OBTAIN. 'And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain: escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.'--Genesis 19:17. London: Printed for John Marshall, at the Bible in Gracechurch Street, 1698. ADVERTISEMENT BY THE EDITOR. About forty years ago a gentleman, in whose company I had commenced my
John Bunyan—The Works of John Bunyan Volumes 1-3

Of the Effects of those Prerogatives.
From these prerogatives there will arise to the elect in heaven, five notable effects:-- 1. They shall know God with a perfect knowledge (1 Cor. i. 10), so far as creatures can possibly comprehend the Creator. For there we shall see the Word, the Creator; and in the Word, all creatures that by the Word were created; so that we shall not need to learn (of the things which were made) the knowledge of him by whom all things were made. The most excellent creatures in this life, are but as a dark veil
Lewis Bayly—The Practice of Piety

Ecclesiastes
It is not surprising that the book of Ecclesiastes had a struggle to maintain its place in the canon, and it was probably only its reputed Solomonic authorship and the last two verses of the book that permanently secured its position at the synod of Jamnia in 90 A.D. The Jewish scholars of the first century A.D. were struck by the manner in which it contradicted itself: e.g., "I praised the dead more than the living," iv. 2, "A living dog is better than a dead lion," ix. 4; but they were still more
John Edgar McFadyen—Introduction to the Old Testament

Christ the King at his Table. Ss 1:2-5,12,13,17.
Christ the King at his table. SS 1:2-5,12,13,17. Let him embrace my soul, and prove Mine interest in his heav'nly love; The voice that tells me, "Thou art mine," Exceeds the blessings of the vine. On thee th' anointing Spirit came, And spreads the savor of thy name; That oil of gladness and of grace Draws virgin souls to meet thy face. Jesus, allure me by thy charms, My soul shall fly into thine arms! Our wand'ring feet thy favors bring To the fair chambers of the King. [Wonder and pleasure tune
Isaac Watts—The Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts

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