The theme of this symphony of pessimism is stridently announced in the first notes of the overture: "Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! Everything is vanity." The world and its happenings, man and his strivings, pleasure, pain, wisdom, folly, good and evil--all is utterly empty; existence has no meaning and no worth. All is chance and change, in which things endlessly go round and round, but plan, purpose, progress is nowhere to be seen. And as all have one lot, even this senseless and inconstant fortune, so death sooner or later overtakes all alike and ends the strange play without plot we call human life. Of a divine providence directed to any end or by any principle, of a justice above which requites men according to their deeds, long years and happiness to the wise and good, adversity and premature death to the wicked and foolish, Koheleth, looking on the world of things as they are with searching eyes, discovers no sign. Of another world and an immortal soul, with which some of his contemporaries consoled themselves, he, keeping his thinking within the bounds of experience, knows nothing. Man dies as the beast dies, the same vital breath is in them both, all are of dust and turn to dust again; nor has man any advantage over the beast, they all have the same end (iii. 19-21; ix. 4-6). There is consolation in this thought, when the misery of the world weighs too heavy on the heart. The dead are better off than the living, but happier still it would be never to be born to see the evils that are under the sun (iv. 2 f.). When we look the facts squarely in the face, the only counsel of wisdom is to make the most of what capricious fortune gives us in its friendly moods, to enjoy the pleasures life offers while we can, with abandon, but without excess. For the "too much" is always evil, even too much wisdom and virtue! "Be not over righteous nor put on too much wisdom, why shouldest thou die before thy time?" (vii. 16 f.). The author's religion makes God somehow the cause of what happens under the sun, the evil and the good. In one place he seems to express the belief that all that God does is fine and opportune, if man could only understand it; but God has denied man the intelligence to penetrate the secret of his ways. So there is nothing better for man to do than to be merry, and have a good time while he is alive! It is easy to imagine what scandal all this gave to pious souls, and it was very natural that orthodox editors should try to neutralize Koheleth's scepticism and his epicurean counsels by notes in an opposite sense. A modern editor would have put his protests into footnotes, as for example to Gibbon's famous chapters on the spread of Christianity; an ancient editor, having no footnotes, put his incontinently into the text.