Under The Sun # 2

Under The Sun # 2

Then he thinks he has discovered something really substantial, and so goes to building great works and houses, chief of which is the magnificent temple, still called by his name. It required seven years to build it, and took the combined efforts of one hundred and eighty-three thousand Jews and strangers to do the work. It took ten thousand men eleven years to cut the trees. There were eighty thousand hewers of wood, and seventy thousand burden bearers. There were eighty thousand squared stones, all so perfectly shaped in the quarries that the sound of neither hammer nor mallet was heard in putting them together in the temple.

At the completion of the work there was a feast of seven days at its dedication, and Solomon sacrificed one hundred and twenty thousand sheep and twenty thousand oxen.

The temple was built of white marble, so artfully joined that it appeared like one stone. The roof was of olive wood, covered with pure gold. That is where the idea of covering the domes of many of our capitol buildings with gold leaf originated. When the sunshine fell on the temple its splendor was so dazzling that the eyes were almost blinded.

The temple courts and apartments could house three hundred thousand people. There were fourteen hundred an fifty-three columns of Parian (fine white) marble; twenty-nine hundred and six pilasters or columns. Over three billion dollars worth of gold was used. One billion dollars worth of silver was used on the floors and walls, which were overlaid with gold and silver.

There were two hundred targets of beaten gold, with six hundred shekels of gold in each target. There were three hundred target shields of beaten gold, with three pounds of gold in each shield, and the value of the gold that came to Solomon in one year was about twenty millions of dollars. When the temple was dedicated the glory of God filled it.

Then Solomon turned his great talent and wealth toward making a beautiful Jerusalem, by planting vineyards and laying out gardens that were like Fairyland, and then like a tale of magic he produced orchards, in which he had a great collection of the finest and rarest trees in all the world. Trees from every clime, and flowers of every kind, and all these were kept green and beautiful by irrigation from artificial lakes. It is doubtful if the world had ever seen greater beauty than Solomon with his unlimited power produced in Jerusalem at that time, but even all this pleased his fancy only for a little while, and soon he seems to have nothing but dust in his mouth, and again cries out, "All is vanity!"

But almost immediately he seems to have taken up another whim, and says, "I got me servants and maidens, and also had great possessions of great and small cattle, above all that were in Jerusalem before me. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings, and of the provinces. I got me men singers and women singers, and the delights of doubt, that he became an art collector, and began to feed on the beautiful, the artistic and aesthetic, somewhat as millionaires are doing now, securing for himself the very best to be had in painting, old china, bric-a-brac, sculpture, musical instruments, singers and performers, and then to float in the air, and drink to the full all he could get out of them in the way of enjoyment.

But presently he is again almost dying with disappointment, and crying out in the same old doleful tone, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit!"

Meaning that there was almost nothing in it all but an empty puff of air that could only fill a bubble for a moment. And then he goes on to say, "So I was great, and increased more than all that there were before me in Jerusalem; and whatever mine eyes desired I kept not from them. I withheld not my heart from joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labor. Then I looked on all the works my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do and, "Behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun!"
And so this wise and honored and wealth man goes on drinking first from one golden cup and then another, only to dash them all away as soon as tasted in bitter disappointment, and then after he has tried them all, to say, "Not one can satisfy!"  confirming what his father David had said in the statement, "The young lions do lack and suffer hunger," and just what every millionaire on earth today knows from his own experience.

To find starvation of the most awful kind today, don't go down into the slums, but go to the people who re enormously wealthy. Andrew Carnegie says there are no happy millionaires, and Andy ought to know, for he's got the dough. John D. Rockefeller has about as good as confessed that he got more out of the first thousand dollars he made than out of any ten millions he has made since, and today he is perhaps the hungriest man in all the world.

~Billy Sunday~

(continued with # 3)