Ecclesiastes 1:11 [There is] no remembrance of former [things]; neither shall there be [any] remembrance of [things] that are to come with [those] that shall come after.
Ver. 11. There is no remembrance of former things.] None to speak of. How many memorable matters were never recorded! How many ancient records long since perished! How many fragments of very good authors are come bleeding to our hands, that live, as many of our castles do, but only by their ruins! God hath by a miracle preserved the Holy Bible from the injury of times and tyrants, who have sought to abolish it. There we have a true remembrance of former things done in the Church by Abraham and his offspring, when the grandees of the earth, Ninus, Belus, &c., lie wrapt up in the sheet of shame, or buried in the grave of utter oblivion. Diodorus Siculus confesseth that all heathen antiquities, before the Theban and Trojan wars, are either fabulous relations or little better. Ezra - that wrote one of the last in the Old Testament - lived before any chronicles of the world now extant in the world.
Neither shall there be any remembrance.] Unless transmitted to posterity by books and writings, which may preserve and keep alive their memory, and testify for their authors that such have one day lived.
“ - Quis nosset Erasmum,
Chilias aeternum si latuisset opus?”
Nineveh, "that great city," is nothing else but a sepulture of herself; no more shall Rome be ere long. Time shall triumph over it, when it shall but then live by fame, if at all, as others now do.