Ecclesiastes 3:11

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time Better, as removing the ambiguity of the possessive pronoun in modern English ears, "in its time." The thinker rests for a time in the primeval faith of Israel that all things were created "very good" (Genesis 1:31), in the Stoic thought of a divine system, a Cosmosof order and of beauty, of a plan, even in the development of human history, in which all things work together for good. So even in Lucretius,

"Certa suo quia tempore semina rerum

Cum confluxerunt, patefit quodcumque creator."

"So when the germs of things in season due

Have met together, all creation's work

Is to our eyes made open."

De Rer. Nat. i. 176.

What hinders it from being a final resting-place of thought is that his knowledge is confined within narrow limits. He sees but a fragment, and the "most part" of the Divine Work "is hid."

also he hath set the world in their heart The Hebrew for "world" (primarily, "the hidden") is that which, in its adverbial or adjectival use, constantly appears in the English Version as "for ever," "perpetual," "everlasting," "always," "eternal," and the like. No other meaning but that of a duration, the end or beginning of which is hidden from us, and which therefore is infinite, or, at least, indefinite, is ever connected with it in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and this is its uniform sense in this book (chs. Ecclesiastes 1:4; Ecclesiastes 1:10; Ecclesiastes 2:16; Ecclesiastes 3:14; Ecclesiastes 9:6; Ecclesiastes 12:5). In post-Biblical Hebrew it passes into the sense of the Greek αἰῶν, for the age, or the worldconsidered in its relation to time and, on the theory of authorship adopted in the Introductionthere is, perhaps, an approximation to that sense here. We must however translate, as the nearest equivalent, He hath set eternity (or, the everlasting) in their heart. The thought expressed is not that of the hope of an immortality, but rather the sense of the Infinite which precedes it, and out of which at last it grows. Man has the sense of an order perfect in its beauty. He has also the sense of a purpose working through the ages from everlasting to everlasting, but "beginning" and "end" are alike hidden from him and he fails to grasp it. In modern language he sees not "the beginning and the end," the whence and the whither, of his own being, or of that of the Cosmos. He is oppressed with what German thinkers have named the Welt-Schmerz, the world-sorrow, the burden of the problems of the infinite and unfathomable Universe. Here again we have an echo of Stoic language as reproduced by Cicero, "Ipse autem homo natus est ad mundum contemplandum et imitandum" (de Nat. Deor. ii. 14. 37). All interpretations resting on later ideas of the "world," as meaning simply the material universe, or worldly pleasures, or worldly wisdom, have to be rejected as inconsistent with lexical usage. By some writers, however, the word, with a variation in the vowels, has been taken as itself meaning "wisdom," but though this signification is found in a cognate word in Arabic, it is unknown in Hebrew.