"7 A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death than the day of birth.
2 It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
5 It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.
6 For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fools;
this also is vanity.
7 Surely oppression drives the wise into madness,
and a bribe corrupts the heart.
8 Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
9 Be not quick in your spirit to become angry,
for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.
10 Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
11 Wisdom is good with an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.
12 For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.
13 Consider the work of God:
who can make straight what he has made crooked?
14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him."
Ecclesiastes 7:1-14
What is being said is this: You have to think out a philosophy of life that will take into consideration the stubborn facts of human experience. You just cannot leave sorrow, adversity, death, out of the reckoning, turning a blind eye to them as if they did not exist. It is profoundly unrealistic to do so; for adversity, sorrow, death itself will ultimately knock at every door; and if they have not been reckoned upon, life will be shattered, and shown to be the foolish thing it is. Stuart Barton Babbage in his remarkable book 'The Mark of Cain' deals in one of its chapters with 'The Enigma of Death' in which he quotes a modern writer as saying that 'The fact of death is the great human repression, the universal "complex". Dying is the reality that man dare not face, and to escape which he summons all his resources ... death is muffled up in illusions'. He refers to the fact that in the 19th century the processes of birth and reproduction were never mentioned in polite society, whereas the processes of death were an accepted subject of ordinary conversation. By contrast, however, today, the processes of death are seldom mentioned in polite society except in euphemisms, whereas the processes of birth and reproduction are a matter of compulsive preoccupation and anxious concern. Our grandparents, in their embarrassment and self-consciousness over the facts of birth, said that babies were found under gooseberry bushes, and we, in our self-consciousness over the facts of death, speak of 'passing on'. He quotes Arthur Koestler as saying that 'morticians (undertakers) endeavour to transform the dead, with lipstick and rouge, into horizontal members of a perennial cocktail party', and that 'this horrid pantomime is due to the fact that there has been a flight from the tragic facts of existence'. The fact of the matter is that without any certainty about the life to come, modern man finds the facts of death and physical decomposition too horrible to contemplate, let alone to discuss or describe. This is what life under 'the sun' is like. How much better, then, to view life from a transcendent perspective!