"12 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, 3 in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed,4 and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— 5 they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets— 6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. 8 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
9 Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. 10 The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
11 The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. 12 My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."
Ecclesiastes 12:1-14
We should note how different the Preacher's emphasis is (in terms of what was said in the previous introductory Note) from so much contemporary thinking. It is often said today, 'Time enough to think of these things when conscious of need and of the frailties of age and infirmity' - that is, 'you only need religion to bolster the failing powers of mind and body, not in the days of your strength'. But the very opposite is true, according to the Preacher. It is not a question of remembering our Creator because of a sense of need of Him, but because it is our duty to worship Him and fear His Name. Lesslie Newbigin, in his remarkable book, 'The Other Side of 1984' observes that the difference between mediaeval society and our own time is that mediaeval society emphasised the idea of the duties involved for each person by his or her position within society, whereas from the Enlightenment onwards, it was the 'rights of man' that became axiomatic. The result of this kind of thinking is that the world becomes (as in the contemporary western world it has become) a place where each individual has the 'right' to pursue 'happiness' in the domestic and privatised sense, and it is the responsibility of the state to see that this right is honoured. Well, we see the fruit of this today with a vengeance, when the whole concept of duty has become a dirty word in the human vocabulary, and 'rights' are paramount, even if gaining and maintaining our rights should cause untold damage to individuals and society alike. We should get wise to the ultimate implications of such an attitude, and recognise that it is this that explains the spiralling escalation of violence in the world. What, after all, is terrorism - whether of the IRA or of the Lockerbie bombers or of the animal rights atrocities - but the insistent demand that their particular rights should be established? This is worth thinking about, for there is something very fundamental here.