Read the lives of illustrious men; how melancholy often are the latter days of those who have climbed the highest!  Caesar is stabbed when he has conquered the world.  Diocletian retires in disgust from the government of an empire.  Godfrey languishes in grief when he has taken Jerusalem.  Charles V. shuts himself up in a convent.  Galileo, whose spirit has roamed the heavens, is a prisoner of the Inquisition.  Napoleon masters a continent, and expires on a rock in the ocean.  Mirabeau dies of despair when he has kindled the torch of revolution.  The poetic soul of Burns passes away in poverty and moral eclipse.  Madness overtakes the cool satirist Swift, and mental degeneracy is the final condition of the fertile-minded Scott.  The high-souled Hamilton perishes in a petty quarrel, and curses overwhelm Webster in the halls of his early triumphs.  What a confirmation of the experience of Solomon!  “Vanity of vanities” write on all walls, in all the chambers of pleasure, in all the palaces of pride!

This is the burden of the preaching of Solomon; but it is also the lesson which is taught by all the records of the past, and all the experiences of mankind.  Yet it is not sad when one considers the dignity of the soul and its immortal destinies.  It is sad only when the disenchantment of illusions is not followed by that holy fear which is the beginning of wisdom,—­that exalted realism which we believe at last sustained the soul of the Preacher as he was hastening to that country from whose bourn no traveller returns.

ELIJAH.

NINTH CENTURY B.C.

DIVISION OF THE JEWISH KINGDOM.

Evil days fell upon the Israelites after the death of Solomon.  In the first place their country was rent by political divisions, disorders, and civil wars.  Ten of the tribes, or three quarters of the population, revolted from Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and successor, and took for their king Jeroboam,—­a valiant man, who had been living for several years at the court of Shishak, king of Egypt, exiled by Solomon for his too great ambition.  Jeroboam had been an industrious, active-minded, strong-natured youth, whom Solomon had promoted and made much of.  The prophet Ahijah had privately foretold to him that, on account of the idolatries tolerated by Solomon, ten of the tribes should be rent away from, the royal house and given to him.  The Lord promised him the kingdom of Israel, and (if he would be loyal to the faith) the establishment of a dynasty,—­“a sure house.”  Jeroboam made choice of Shechem for his capital; and from political reasons,—­for fear that the people should, according to their custom, go up to Jerusalem to worship at the great festivals of the nation, and perhaps return to their allegiance to the house of David, while perhaps also to compromise with their already corrupted and unspiritualized religious sense,—­he made two golden calves and set them up for religious worship:  one in Bethel, at the southern end of the kingdom; the other in Dan, at the far north.