For our purposes they have a necessary message. The truths they tell, the criticism of men and things they make, are as applicable to modern life as are the extremely acute generalisations of _The Proverbs_. They spur, chide, stimulate, promise reward to, and inspire, the wise and the prudent of these days, as they did the people of the times wherein they were written. The world is, after all, intensely conservative. The changes wrought by humanity inevitably work in cycles, and come back to points passed, days, years, ages before. There is, indeed--so we come to the over-quoted aphorism of Solomon--nothing new under the sun. Man in his vanities, his little pride, his temporary strength, his abundant weakness, is the same creature precisely--for what essential difference do modern rules and trappings really make?--as he was when the sun looked down on flocks and herds in the pleasant pastures of Palestine, where now are wearying rocks and blistering sand; as he was when the harp of David, the drums and trumpets of Sennacherib, the war-cries of the Maccabees, challenged the hills and valleys of Judæa for a little while, and then were still. Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities, all is vanity! The unknown writer of _The Wisdom of Solomon_ in measure echoed and carried on that humbling, eternal truth; so, too, though with still slighter voice, did Jesus the Son of Sirach, who, sometime in the two to three hundred years preceding the dawn of the Christian era, wrote this generally neglected wisdom-book, _Ecclesiasticus_. But, besides the vanity of man, these sages also spoke, even though vaguely, of the hope which waited on him. That is not to be forgotten.