"1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes round to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after."
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
Given the premise that this life is all that there is to life, then the only possible conclusion is despair and emptiness, and all attempts to force it to yield either sense or satisfaction are doomed to despair. Nature is a closed system, and history a mere succession of events. As someone has said, 'man is perpetually toiling, yet of all his toils there remains no abiding result. The natural world exhibits the spectacle of unceasing activity with no real progress'. It is important for us to realise, however, that this is not the message that the Preacher has to proclaim. Rather, his purpose is to meet on their own ground people who think of the world in these terms, and to say, in effect, to them: 'This is all you think the world is? Very well, you must realise that certain things follow on this premise'. And step by step he brings people to the position of utter despair, destroying with merciless blows the false happinesses which they continually seek in the world, and which never fulfil their promise, in order that they might be able to find true happiness in accepting life in all its changes and chances from the hand of God. This is the way of faith. Despair does not have the last word - although it will have, if God is left out - there is something else to be said and the Preacher proclaims that 'something else' - the reality of the unseen world, and the life of God that can break into the soul of man - and he does so, sometimes in whimsical ways and with a quiet humour which is very refreshing.