How can patience and correction help when life does not seem fair?

Atlas of Saints · Chapter summary

The Preacher values honest correction and patience, while admitting that wisdom does not answer every question.

Chapter breakdown

The Preacher begins by asking how people can know what is good for them or what will follow their short lives. A good name matters more than fine perfume. A house of mourning reminds the living that everyone will die. A wise rebuke can help more than a fool’s flattery. Challoner explains the chapter’s praise of anger as correction or rightful zeal against evil, rather than a call to quick temper. The speaker later warns against becoming angry too easily. He also rejects the careless claim that earlier times were always better.

Wisdom and money can both offer protection, but he says wisdom gives life to its owner. Enjoy a good day and prepare for a bad one: God has made both. The speaker has seen a just person die and a wicked person live long. Challoner reads the warning against being too just as a warning against judging God’s patience with the wicked too harshly. His note on great wickedness warns that sin may leave no room for mercy.

The listener should support the just and fear God. Wisdom can strengthen someone more than ten city princes. Yet no one on earth does good without sinning. Do not attend to every insult, the Preacher says: remember that you too have spoken badly of others.

His search for wisdom reaches a depth he cannot master. He describes a woman whose heart and hands trap a sinner, while the person who pleases God escapes. He reports finding one man among a thousand, but no woman among those he examined. These are the speaker’s reported findings. The chapter ends with his claim that God made people upright, but people became caught in countless questions. Challoner calls the final matter obscure and difficult.

The story inside

The chapter moves from mourning and correction to patience in an unfair world. The Preacher then admits the limits of his own search for wisdom.

Lessons worth keeping

1
A wise correction can be more useful than flattery.
2
Do not judge every insult without remembering your own faults.
3
The Preacher admits that wisdom remains difficult to reach.

Test your recall

Why does the Preacher warn against listening to every insult?

Show answer

You may hear someone speak badly of you, but your own conscience knows that you have also spoken badly of others.

Source edition and notes

Douay–Rheims, revised by Richard Challoner (1749–1752). Project Gutenberg no. 1581. Locators refer to lines in the admitted pg1581.txt edition. Source notes may include Challoner commentary.

Lines 70526–70527
A good name is better than precious ointments: and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.
Lines 70529–70531
It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of feasting: for in that we are put in mind of the end of all, and the living thinketh what is to come.
Lines 70561–70563
For as wisdom is a defence, so money is a defence: but learning and wisdom excel in this, that they give life to him that possesseth them.
Lines 70568–70570
In the good day enjoy good things, and beware beforehand of the evil day: for God hath made both the one and the other, that man may not find against him any just complaint.
Lines 70594–70595
For there is no just man upon earth, that doth good, and sinneth not.
Lines 70624–70626
Only this I have found, that God made man right, and he hath entangled himself with an infinity of questions.