Life, as shown in these wisdom-books, is a shadowy affair. We have the experienced patriarch’s view of it as a business to which, uninvited, man was put to be got through manfully. “We also, as soon as we were born, ceased to be”--how sombrely true are those words!--and “Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.” Yes: but the snatched fragment of fleeting time contains an opportunity for knowing truth and practising wisdom. “My Soul,” says _Ecclesiasticus_, “prove thy soul in thy life.” There we find the kernel of all this philosophy. Existence on earth is the opportunity for duty: do it--now! Other passages, no doubt, could be quoted, giving a cruder meaning to the message of these books; but mine, I claim, is the truest. Wisdom calls for duty: duty necessitates discipline. Again and again that truth is asserted and that note struck. Sometimes Ben Sira carries the call for discipline to undue length, in connection with the upbringing of children, for example, as did Solomon the King when he advised that unsparing use of the rod which our fathers took too literally; but, justly, these writers, knowing the people of their and our days, insist on the absolute necessity of discipline in every walk of life. The writer of _The Wisdom of Solomon_--loftier and deeper was he than Ben Sira--goes further yet, for, after saying that Wisdom “is radiant and fadeth not away,” he proceeds to assert that “her true beginning is desire of discipline.” The pupil must wish and seek as well as the master teach; and then, the reward, “All the gold of the earth in her presence is a little sand,” and “in kinship with wisdom is immortality.” The immortality promised in the Apocrypha is, however, only a flicker and vague, yet is it something considering the time of the writing, for from the feeblest sparks may spring, as from those sparks there sprang, consuming flames and light, life-giving. There is a side to the teaching of _Ecclesiasticus_ which is not to be ignored, as it represents the duller facets of the great jewels of eastern wisdom. Ben Sira abused woman badly. She was to him, as she is still to others not only in the unmoving orient, a chattel for degraded uses; a chattering burden; untrustworthy, mischievous; a hewer of wood and drawer of water for her generous master, man. He bluntly represents a woman’s wickedness as wickedness at its worst. His advice of how to treat a daughter is, to put it mildly, unpleasant. As for the nagging housewife--were the tents and habitations of Israel so heavily afflicted?--the nuisance inspired him to a simile, “As the going up of a sandy way is to the feet of the aged, so is the wife full of words to a quiet man.”