MoiTis.] 'J-L^ [Oct. 5, 



nation, naturally attracted men of science and thought around him, just as 

 in later days they were to be found at the court of Haroun al Raschid. 

 Then the public works, undertaken and carried out so magnificently with 

 the aid of skilled men from Tyre, for instance, would have brought to- 

 gether the architects and mechanicians, the sculptors and brassfouuders, 

 and many other artisans whose occupations and achievements must have 

 seemed most marvelous to the nation of shepherds and herdsmen. We 

 read in the sacred history of the brassfoundings and castings made by 

 some of these men, and can readily comprehend after clouds of smoke 

 from the furnaces had filled the valley and plain of the Jordan, and forms 

 of beauty and grace came from the moulds prepared by these foreign- 

 ers, how tales of genii and afreets spread among the people, and Solo- 

 mon's ring became invested with the magical powers which it possessed 

 in the imaginations of the East. We can see the genesis of stories like 

 that of Aladdin. But amid all this concourse of men of thought and ac- 

 tion the guiding spirit is that of Solomon. Of studious, reflective, observant 

 and judicial turn of mind, we find recorded among his works not only 

 proverbs and poems, but treatises on natural history. We are informed 

 that he "spake of trees from the hyssop to the cedar of Lebanon," i. e., 

 from mosses to conifers, "and of beasts and fowl, creeping things and 

 fishes." Though these treatises are lost, we may judge of his accuracy 

 from such allusions as are made in Proverbs and Solomon's Song to the 

 habits and actions of both animals and men. 



We may then easily picture to ourselves this powerful king gathering 

 around him a sort of Academy of Sciences, or Royal Philosophical Society, 

 belore which would come many and varied subjects of interested discus- 

 sion among representative men of the differing civilizations of the period. 

 Before such an " Assembly" or e/.y.lrj(na, Or acting perhaps as its Secre- 

 tary or Reporter or Clerk, zy.Y.Xr^aiaGTri^, we may imagine him reading a 

 paper on the theme of man : his object and destiny in the universe, and 

 how he can attain to his best development, his highest good. We may 

 suppose Egyptian Materialism, Assyrian Fatalism, and Tyrian Commer- 

 cialism or Opportunism well represented in the audience, either taking part 

 in the discussion or having their respective views stated, to be criticised and 

 shown to be partly erroneous or insufficient, and followed by the statement 

 of his own solution, and the application of it to the whole problem. This 

 is to be found in Ch. viii. 1 : "Wisdom maketh a man's face to shine." 

 It we look to Solomon's conception and impersonification of Wisdom as 

 given in Proverbs viii and ix, and think of the contrast he draws between it 

 and " the false woman "as Socrates ages after did between the true and fiilse 

 reason, and recall the devotion of the Alexandrian school to the Holy Wis- 

 dom which led to the opening words of John's Gospel in which the same 

 wisdom is called The Word — Aoyo<i — the Son of God, and afterwards to the 

 erection of " Hagia Sophia " at Constantinople, we shall, it seems to me, 

 gain the clue so much sought after to this Book of Ecclesiastes. It then 

 all comes into logical form as a grand discussion on the theme of what 



