Oh, my Saviour glorified, Turn my eye from all beside. Let me but Thy beauty see,-- Other light is dark to me. But the Preacher's experiences of anomalies are by no means ended. These alternations of adversity and prosperity, he says, whilst there is no forecasting _when_ they will come, so there seems to be no safeguard, even in righteousness and wisdom, against them. They are not meted out here at all on the lines of righteousness. The just man dies in his righteousness, whilst the wicked lives on in his wickedness: therefore be not righteous overmuch; do not abstain, or withdraw thyself, from the natural blessings of life, making it joyless and desolate; but then err not on the other side, going into folly and licentiousness,--a course which naturally tends to cut off life itself. It is the narrow way of philosophy: as said the old Latins, "Medio tutissimus ibis," "midway is safety"; but Solomon is here again, as we have seen before, on a far higher moral elevation than any of the heathen philosophers, for he has one sheet-anchor for his soul from the evils of either extreme, in the fear of God. As for the despairing, hopeless groans of "vanity," we, with our God-given grace, learn to feel pity for our Author, so for his moral elevation do we admire him, whilst for his sincerity and love of truth we learn to respect and love him. See in the next few verses that clear, cold, true, reason of his, confessing the narrow limits of its powers, and yet the whole soul longs, as if it would burst all bars to attain to that which shall solve its perplexity. "Thus far have I attained by wisdom," he says, "and yet still I cry for wisdom. I see far off the place where earth can reach and touch the heavens; but when, by weary toil and labor, I reach that spot, those heavens are as inimitably high above me as ever, and an equally long journey lies between me and the horizon where they meet. Oh, that I might be wise; but it was far from me." Now, in our version, the next verse reads very tamely and flat, in view of the strong emotion under which it is so clear that the whole of the book was written. "That which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" The Revised, both in text and margin, gives us a hint of another thought, "That which is, or hath been, is afar off," etc. But other scholars, in company with the Targum and many an old Jewish writer, lift the verse into harmony with the impassioned utterances of this noble man, as he expresses in broken ejaculatory phrase his longings and his powerlessness: "Far off, the past,--what is it? Deep,--that deep! Ah, who can sound? Then turned I, and my heart, to learn, explore. To seek out wisdom, reason--sin to know-- Presumption--folly--vain impiety.