Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1905. WISER THAN SOLOMON.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 10300, 7 March 1905, Page 2

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1905. WISER THAN SOLOMON.

Some remarks made by Dr. Fitchett at the Methodist centenary celebrations m Sydney a few days ago have raised an interesting newspaper controversy. The author of "Deeds That Won the Empire" threw down the gauntlet to the ancient sage, and) on the strength of having livedi 3000 years after him claimed to be much wiser than. Solomon, the world's proverbially wisest man. Solomon not being here to defend himself, one of tlie leading Sydney dailies took up the cudgels on his behalf. The writer says it is quite true that the world during the past thirty centuries lias foundl out a great many thongs that Solomon does not appear to have known, but it is also a fact that he possessed 1 a few little bits of information which the cutest man m Melbourne would be glad toi get hold' of. He had a knowledge of gold-mining, for instance, which enabled 1 him to find and! secretly exploit the great Op'hir field for wliich even at the present day men 3000 years older are vainly prospecting. Against that, however, Dr. Fitelicit can put all the discoveries which science has made during the intervening ages, and preserved for him m the storehouse of print, whidhi Solomon did not possess, being obliged* to carry his whole stock of knowledge under his own hat. But knowledge and wisdom are not necessarily convertible terms, and whether the world grows wiser m proportion to the number of facts elicited from Mother Nature is a moot question too long and too involved for full discussion here. Roughly speaking, the only real wisdom is that -which, enables people to live more happily than they could' have lived without it, and it is upon this point that the claim of Dr. Fitchett must undergo its test. That people have found out a vast number of things? apparently intended to smoother tlie journey of life since Solomon went through it, the writer goes on to state, is a matter admitting of no dispute. Whether to the individual there is any more profit under the sun m it all is, however, largely a matter of opinion governedl by circumstance. The first-class passenger m the ocean liner finds much comfort from the invention of the steam engine, which enables him to cross the Atlantic almost as easily as Solomon m all his glory could cross the Jordfcin river. For him, when he wants to make that trip, the knowledge gained during the thirty hundred years since Solomon, died has certainly not been m vain. It represents undoubted) profit under the sun. as far as lie is concerned. But to th© man working m the stokehold! for barely enough to keep him alive, the matter may appear m a different light. If 'he is* also 3000 years older and '• wiser than Solomon, the increased wisdom dbes not appear to be of very great use to him. An ordinary man can travel on a pneumatic-tyred bicycle as far m a day as five times the distance from. Jerusalem to Joppa, which was considered! a good record for long after Solomon's time, when the bicycle was unknown. But his profit through being able to do so, like that of the people m the ocean steamer, is a variable quantity. If he is travelling because he must travel, he will be just as tired' al the end of the day as the man on foot. And if he has covered' five times the distance, -what then? The demands of what is called modern progress will require him to make five such journeys where Solomon's contemporary had only to make one. If wisdom its. to be judged by the amount of ease and comfort and happiness wliich it brings to men, who will say which of these two had the greater share of it? Every new implement which Nature, out of her inexhaustible stock, gives to men for the better performance of the work of tlheir 1 lives, compels them to go that much faster with it, while the amount of human endurance available is not correspondingly increased. We have since Solomon's time learned how to prevent plagues, and cut out cancers, but m the mental stress by which such knowledge has been evolved has been developed dyspepsia and neurosis and sti-mulant-craving as a relief for intellectual ennui. Many men, of course, get the benefit of the 3000 years' education which the world has had since just before the ten tribes of Israel got lost without having to pay this penalty. They 'draw their food and drink from the four corners of the earth'; they know each evening the news of all tlie -world before it has grown 24 houra stale, and aGI the time enjoy robust tranquility of mind and body. Such men have undoubtedly a better time than the noaccount Israelite of 3000 years ago, but the question, which Dr. Fitchett raises is, have they a better time than Solomon? For the men -who have to earn their family's breakfast before they can eat it, and who live sn> constant fear of the morrow, the world never seems lo get any wiser, and to them tlie fact of being 3000 years older than other men who had! to live the same lives has but little meaning. Whether this will always be the same (says the Sydney paper) is a problem with which the combined wisdom of a Solomon and a Fiitchett might, perhaps, wrestle m vain. But whatever the result, and whether it makes the world wiser or not, progress will have lo go on. Men could not stop it even if they wouldl It is plainly part of Nature's scheme. And it is further apparent that men must continue gathering the knowledge which Dr. Fitchett calls wisdom at an ever-increasing ratio of speed.. The rate at which the pace has been accelerated during the past century has caused the discoveries of that period to exceed those of the previous ten. Perhaps a form of knowledge will eventually come, bringing with it the arrears of wisdom that have yet to be made up before Dr. Fitehett's claim that 3000 years old is 3000 years witser will carry its justification on its face. .