THE BUILDER JUNE 1918

"REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR"

Can you put me on the track of some reliable exposition of
Ecclesiasties 12:1-7 ? It sounds beautiful in recitation, but
largely meaningless. As chaplain of Norwood Lodge, No. 119, in the
Grand Registry of Manitoba I am especially interested as it falls
to me to recite the passage in "raising." "Let there be light." L.
F., Manitoba.

Good for you, Brother Fraser! The bane of Masonry is the constant
repetition of the ritual by men who never make an attempt to
discover the meaning of what they are saying.

The sacred sentences which fall on the ears of the candidate as he
makes his mystic round are so heavy with poignant beauty that one
hesitates to intrude the harsh language of prose upon such strains
of poetry, solemn sweet. We may well believe that the men who
introduced the reading here had no other thought than that the
words might the better create an atmosphere in which the coming
drama of hate and doom might all the more impressively come home to
the heart of the participants. If such was their purpose neither
Shakespeare nor Dante could have found words or sentiments more
appropriate to the hour. There is a music and majesty in the
twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes which leaves us dumb with awe and
wonder and our hearts open to the impressions of a tragedy
alongside which the doom of Lear seems insignificant and vain

For generations the commentators of Holy Writ have seen in the
allegory of this chapter a reference to the decay of the body and
the coming of death; to them, the golden bowl was the skull, the
silver cord was the spinal nerve, "the keepers of the house" were
the hands, the "strong men" the limbs; the whole picture is made to
symbolize the body's falling into ruin and the approach of death.*
One hesitates to differ from an interpretation so true in its
application and so dignified by its associations But it must be
doubted whether the sad and disillusioned man who penned the lines
possessed either the knowledge of human anatomy implied by the old
interpretation or the intention to make his poem into a medical
description of senility. A more thorough scholarship has come to
see in the allegory a picture of the horror of death set forth by
metaphors drawn from an Oriental thunderstorm.

It had been a day of wind and cloud and rain; but the clouds did
not, as was usual, disperse after the shower. They returned again
and covered the heavens with their blackness. Thunderstorms were so
uncommon in Palestine that they always inspired fear and dread, as
many a paragraph in the Scriptures will testify. As the storm broke
the strong men guarding the gate of rich men's houses began to
tremble; the hum of the little mills where the women were always
grinding at even time 

* For this version see the article by Bro. Wm. F. Kuhn. "When the
Almond Tree Blossoms," THE; BUILDER, vol. I, p. 188.


suddenly ceased because the grinders were frightened from their
toil; the women, imprisoned in the harems, who had been gazing out
of the lattice to watch the activities of the streets, drew back
into their dark rooms; even the revelers, who had been sitting
about their tables through the afternoon, eating dainties and
sipping wine, lost their appetites, and many were made so nervous
that the sudden twitting of a bird would cause them to start with
anxious surprise.

As the terror of the storm, the poet goes on to say, so is the
coming of death, when man "goes to his home of everlasting and
mourners go about the streets." Whatever men may have been, good or
bad, death brings equal terror to all. A man may have been rich,
like the golden lamp hung on a silver chain in the palace of a
king; he may have been as poor as the earthen pitcher in which
maidens carried water from the public well, or even as crude as the
heavy wooden wheel wherewith they drew the water; what his state
was matters not, death is as dread a calamity to the one as to the
other. When that dark adventure comes the fine possessions in which
men had sought security will be vain to stay the awful passing into
night. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." The one bulwark against
the common calamity, the Preacher urges, is to remember the
Creator, yea, to remember Him from youth to old age; to believe
that one goes to stand before Him is the one and only solace in an
hour when everything falls to ruin and the very desire to live has
been quenched by the ravages of age and the coming of death.

