Theater of the World

Good-hearted reader,

judgment of nature, and indeed often resists it. As Pompey incited the civil war at Rome out of error, while Paris willfully brings his fatherland, Troy, to ruin, in that he willingly and gladly abducted the beautiful Helen from her husband, contrary to what reason told him and what he well knew from the laws. Of such examples there are many, as much in the Holy Scriptures as in secular histories, regarding both the old course of the world and the state of the present time. And the writers of tragedies have no other argument in their dramatibus plays than this lamentation and distress of men. Therefore, pitiable complaints about this are to be found not only in the Bible but also among the ancient poets in general, as the eldest of the pagan theologians, and among philosophers and historians.

The Royal Prophet David cries in the 39th Psalm: O how absolutely nothing are all men. He leads a similar song of lament in the 90th Psalm, likewise in the 144th, and elsewhere.

The wisest and most fortunate King Solomon also considered this, and in his book of Ecclesiastes he repeats these words very often: Everything is entirely vanity. What more does man have from all his labor under the sun? All doing is so full of toil that no one can describe it; likewise: It was all vanity and lamentation, etc. Likewise: What does man gain from all his work and the toil of his heart that he has under the sun, for all his days are pains with grieving and sorrow? That his heart does not rest at night, that too is vanity.