Matthew Poole and continuators on Ecclesiastes 1:13

13 And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven : this sore travel hath God given to the sons of man , to be exercised therewith .

Which Phrase notes his serious and fixed purpose, his great industry and alacrity in it.

To seek diligently and accurately.

Wisely, or by the help of that Wisdom wherewith God had endowed me.

Concerning all the works of God and Men in this lower World, the works of Nature, and their causes, effects, properties and operations, the works of Divine Providence, and God's counsels and ends in them, the work and depths of humane policy in the conduct of Personal, and Domestical, and Publick Affairs.

This difficult and toilsom work of searching out these things

God hath inflicted this as a just punishment upon Man for his eating of the Tree of Knowledge, that instead of that sweet and perfect knowledge which God had freely infused into Man at his first Creation, he should now grope after some small parcels or fragments of it, and those too not to be gotte[illegible: 1+ letters] without the sweat of his brows and brains.

To employ themselves in the painful study of these things, which now is both their duty and their punishment. Or, as it is rendred in the margent, and by many others, to afflict them in or by it, to chastise their former curiosity, and to give them matter of continual humiliation and vexation. And therefore knowledge is so far from making men happy, that it exposeth them to trouble and infelicity.

Marginal references: Or, to afflict th[illegible: 1+ letters]n.