Nevertheless, in many important respects Solomon rendered great services to humanity, which redeemed his memory from shame and made him a truly immortal man, and even a great benefactor.  He left writings which are still among the most treasured inheritances of his nation and of mankind.  It is recorded that he spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.  Only a small portion of these have descended to us in the sacred writings, but they doubtless entered into the literature of the Jews.  Enough remains, whenever they were compiled and collected, to establish his fame as one of the wisest and most gifted of mortals.  And these writings, whatever may have been his backslidings, are pervaded with moral wisdom.  Whether written in youth or in old age, on the summit of human glory or in the depths of despair, they are generally accepted as among the most precious gems of the Old Testament.  His profound experience, conveyed to us in proverbs and songs, remains as a guide in life through all generations.  The dignity of intellect shines triumphantly through all the obscuration of virtues.  Thus do poets live even when buried in ignominious graves; thus do philosophers instruct the world even though, like Seneca, and possibly Bacon, their lives present a sad contrast to their precepts.  Great thoughts emancipate the soul, from age to age, while he who uttered them may have been enslaved by vices.  Who knows what the private life of Shakspeare and Goethe may have been, but who would part with the writings they have left us?  How soon the personal peculiarities of Coleridge and Carlyle will be forgotten, yet how permanent and healthy their utterances!  It is truth, rather than man, that lives and conquers and triumphs.  Man is nothing, except as the instrument of almighty power.

Of the writings ascribed to Solomon, there are three books, each of which corresponds to the different periods of his life,—­to his pious youth, to his prosperous manhood, and to his later years of cynicism and despair.  They all alike blaze with moral truth, and appeal to universal experience.  They present different features of human life, at different periods, and suggest sentiments which most people have realized at some time or another.  And if in some cases they are apparently contradictory, like the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, they are equally striking and convincing, and are not more inconsistent than the man himself.  Who does not change, and yet remain individually the same?  Is there not a change between youth and old age?  Do not most great men utter sentiments hard to be reconciled with one another, yet with equal sincerity?  Webster enforces free-trade at one time and a high tariff at another, as light or circumstances change.  Gladstone was in youth and middle age a pillar of the aristocracy; later he was the oracle of the masses, yet a lofty realism underlay all his utterances.  The writings of Solomon present life in different aspects, and yet they are