515. What Are We to Understand by "Time and Chains Happeneth to Them All"?

You are not to take all the words of Ecclesiastes 9:11 as true and inspired because, as the writer shows, he found out that what he said at one time was disproved later on. He is relating his experience. He was seeking happiness, with everything in favor of his succeeding. At first he believed he would find it in pleasure, afterward in learning, and later in other ways. And he tells how he found again and again that he had been mistaken. In this particular passage he means that the misfortunes of life are just as likely to happen to the wise and good as to the foolish. We know it is so. In a railroad accident, for instance, a clergyman or a philanthropist does not escape simply because of his life being beneficent.