the age of Simonides and Bacchylides, while belief in personal immortality was still an esoteric doctrine, had spoken thus:—
"For mortal man not to be born is best
Nor e'er to see the bright beams of the day;
Since, as life rolls away,
No man that breathes was ever alway blest."
The mournful voice of the Semitic "Preacher" speaks in this key, too, because over him, too, there broods an age full of individualised feelings, but without that eternal conception of human personality which in a manner places the individual on a par with the corporate life of groups or even humanity itself. Like the sun in his daily round, or the wind in his circuits, or the rivers returning to the place from whence they came, moves the life of man; and there is no new thing under the sun, for the "Preacher," like the Alexandrian savants, possesses, or thinks he possesses, universal knowledge. Before this dull round, this fatal law of human cycles, all differences between individuals disappear; an impersonal Fate destroys the distinctions between good and evil bound up so indissolubly with personal morality, and even reduces man, individual and social, to the level of the brute. "For the fate (miqreh, lit. 'what meets') of the sons of man and the fate of the beast are one, as the death of the one so the death of the other; for one spirit is to all, and the advantage of man over the beast is nothing, for all are vanity; all go to one place, all are of the dust and to the dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of the sons of man goes upwards, but the spirit of the beast descends downwards to the earth? … All are alike; one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the pure and the unclean, for him who sacrifices and him who sacrifices not; like good, like sinner. …
