There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it [is] common among men:
Ver. 1. There is an evil that I have seen under the sun.] This wretched life is so pestered with evils that the Preacher could hardly cast his eye beside one or other of them. A diligent observer he was of human miseries, that he might hang loose to life and the better press upon others the vanity of doting upon it. One would wonder, surely, that our life here being so grievously afflicted, should yet be so inordinately affected; and that even by those that are "in deaths often," that have borne God's yoke from their youth, that have suffered troubles without and terrors within, and who, if they had hope in this life only, were, by their own confession, of all men the most unhappy. 1Co 15:19 And yet so it is; God is forced to smoke us out of our clayey cottages, and to make life unto us to be nothing better than a lingering death, that we may grow weary of it, and breathe after a better, a where are riches without rust, pleasure without pain, youth without decay, joy without sorrow, Ubi nihil sit quod nolis, et totum sit quod velis, b where is all that heart can wish, &c. The skilful surgeon mortifieth with straigtht binding the member that must be cut off; so doth God fit us for our cutting off, by binding us with the cords of afflictions. "He crieth not when God bindeth him," Job 36:13 saith Elihu of hypocrites; a generation of men, than the which nothing is more stupid and insensible; c till at length, God making forcible entry upon them, doth violently break that cursed covenant that they have made with death and hell, dash the very breath out of their bodies with one plague upon another, turn them out of their earthly tabernacles, with a firma eiectione, and send them packing to their place in hell, from which they would not be stopped by all those crosses that, for that purpose, he cast in their way.
And it is common among men.] Proper to men, for beasts are not subject to this evil disease, and common to all sorts of men. One evil may well be common among many, when many evils are so commonly upon one. It happened to be a part of Mithridates' misery, that he had made himself unpoisonable. And Cato so felt this miserable life, ut causa moriendi nactum se esse gauderet, d that he was glad of an occasion to go out of the world.
a Aeterna vita vera vita. - August.
b Bernard.
c Hypocritis nihil stupidius. - Pareus, Isa. xxviii.
d Cicero, in Tusc. quaest.