The Old Professor's Final Lecture

In the spring of 1998, Dr. Margaret Ellington stood before her last class at the University of Edinburgh. For forty-one years she had taught philosophy — Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, the postmodernists. She had published nine books, debated at Oxford, and could dismantle any argument with surgical precision.

Her students expected a grand summation. Instead, she set her notes aside, removed her glasses, and said something no one in that lecture hall forgot: "I have spent my life chasing every idea the human mind has produced. I have followed each thread to its end. And I will tell you what I found there — not a system, not a theory, but a Person. Fear the Almighty. Walk humbly. Everything else is footnotes."

The room went silent. A few students laughed nervously, expecting more. But Margaret simply gathered her briefcase and walked out. She meant exactly what she said.

Solomon would have understood that moment perfectly. He had tasted everything — wealth that staggered the imagination, pleasure without limit, architectural wonders, intellectual mastery. He chased meaning under the sun until the road ran out. And when the dust of all that striving finally settled, he wrote one sentence that outweighs every chapter before it: "Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."

After all the searching, the answer was never complicated. It was only costly — a life of quiet, daily reverence before the Holy One who gives every breath its meaning.