Verses 11, 12. Dying regrets. I. The subject of these regrets. It is a man who has disregarded through life the means employed to preserve or reclaim him. What instructors has a man living in a country like this? First, Your connections in life. You may have been a member of a pious family, or had an instructor or a reprover in a brother, friend, or religious neighbour. Second, The Scriptures. Third, Ministers. Fourth, Conscience. Fifth, Irrational creatures. Can you hear the melody of the birds and not be ashamed of your sinful silence? Can you see the heavenly bodies perform unerringly their appointed course and not reflect on your own numberless departures from duty? Sixth, The dispensations of Providence. God has chastened you with sickness. You have stood by dying beds. II. The period of these regrets. It is a dying hour. It is “at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed.” Such a period is unavoidable. The last breath will expire, and the last Sabbath will elapse, and the last sermon will be heard. Such a period cannot be far off. “For what is our life? It is a vapour that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away.” It is a flood. It is a flower. It is a tale that is told. It is a dream. Such a period may be very near. Such a period is sometimes prematurely brought on by sin. III. The nature of these regrets. This mourning is (1) dreadful. A dying hour has been called an honest hour. The world then recedes from view. The delusions of imagination give way. Criminal excuses vanish. Memory goes back and recalls the guilt of the former life, and conscience sets the most secret sins in the light of God’s countenance. (2) It is useless. Not as to others, but as regards the individuals themselves. We are to describe things according to their natural and common course, and not according to occasional exceptions. And in this case exceptions are unusual. And we are borne out in this assertion (1) By Scripture. There we find only one called at this hour. (2) By observation. We have often attended persons on what seemed their dying bed: we have heard their prayers and their professions; we have seen their distress and their relief, and, had they died, we should have presumed on their salvation. But we have never known one of these, who, on recovery, lived so as to prove the reality of his conversion! We have often asked ministers concerning the same case, and they have been compelled to make the same awful declaration.—Jay.
Verse 14. In a spiritual sense this may be applied to those who “hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. i. 18), and who, although they dwell in the midst of holy men in the Church of God, set their example at defiance by evil lives.—Bede.
Verse 15. Desire after forbidden enjoyments naturally springs from dissatisfaction with the blessings already in possession. Where contentment is not found at home it will be sought for, however vainly, abroad. Conjugal love is chief among the earthly gifts in mercy granted by God to His fallen creatures. . . . Whatsoever interrupts the strictest harmony in this delicate relationship, opens the door to temptation. Tender domestic affection is the best defence against the vagrant desires of unlawful passion.—Bridges.
Do not steal water from others. Although the strange woman saith, “Stolen waters are sweet,” yet remember that the dead are there (ch. ix. 17, 18). The wife is called a vessel in 1 Pet. iii. 7. These words also have been expounded by ancient interpreters in a spiritual sense, which may well be present to the reader’s mind; and they have been applied to the pure waters of Divine wisdom, a sense which is suggested by Jer. ii. 13.—Wordsworth.
If God had laid all common, certainly
Man would have been th’ incloser: but since now
God hath impaled us, on the contrary,
Man breaks the fence, and every ground will plough.
O what were man, might he himself misplace!
Sure to be cross he would shift feet and face.—George Herbert.
Spiritual Self-helpfulness.—I. Man has independent spiritual resources. He has a “cistern,” a “well” of his own. First: He has independent resources of thought. Every sane man can and does think for himself. Thoughts well up in every soul, voluntarily and involuntarily. Secondly: He has independent resources of experience. No two have exactly the same experience. Thirdly: He has independent powers of usefulness. Every man has a power to do a something which no other can—to touch some soul with an effectiveness which no other can. Wonderful is this well within—inexhaustible and ever active. II. Man is bound to use these resources. “Drink waters out of thine own cistern;” do not live on others. Self-drawing—First: Honours our own nature. Secondly: Increases our own resources. Self-helpfulness strengthens. The more you draw from this cistern the more comes. Thirdly: Contributes to the good of the universe. The man who gives only what he has borrowed from others adds nothing to the common stock. The subject—First: Indicates the kind of service one man can spiritually render another. To priest, rabbi, sectary, I would say—Man does not require your well; he has a cistern within. What he wants is the warm gospel of love to thaw his frozen nature, and to unseal the exhaustless fountain within, to remove all obstructions from its out-flow, and to make it as pure as the crystal. The subject—Secondly: Suggests an effective method to sap the foundation of all priestly assumptions. Let every man become self-helpful, and the influence of those who arrogate a lordship over the faith of others will soon die out. The subject—Thirdly: Presents a motive for thankfully adoring the Great Creator for the spiritual constitution He has given us. We have resources not, of course, independent of Him the primal fount of all life and power, but independent of all other creatures. We are not like the parched traveller in the Oriental desert, who, because he cannot discover water, dies of thirst. Spiritually, we can walk through sandy deserts bearing an exhaustless spring within.—Dr. David Thomas.
Verse 18. It is not only to feed and clothe her, and refrain from injuring her by word or deed. All this will not discharge a man’s duty nor satisfy a woman’s heart. All the allusions to this relation in Scripture imply an ardent, joyful love. To it, though it lie far beneath heaven, yet to it, as the highest earthly thing, is compared the union of Christ and His redeemed Church. Beware where you go for comfort in distress, and sympathy in happiness. The Lord Himself is the source of all consolation to a soul that seeks Him; yet nature is His, as well as redemption. He has constructed nether springs on earth and supplied them from His own high treasures; and to these He bids a broken or a joyful spirit go for sympathy. To “rejoice in the wife of thy youth”—this is not to put a creature in the place of God. He will take care of His own honour. He has hewn the cistern, and given it to you, and filed it, and when you draw out of it what He has put in, you get from Himself and give Him the glory.—Arnot.
Verse 19. In a spiritual sense, this imagery, derived from the limpid fountains and beautiful animals of the natural world, is regarded by the ancient expositors as descriptive of the delicious refreshment and perfect loveliness of Divine truth, and the infinite blessings which it bestows on those faithful souls which are united to it in pure and unsullied love.—Wordsworth.
Verse 20. A rare instance in which a canto does not begin with “My son,” but with “Why.” The question is intended to be pressed. The commerce with “the strange woman” is so plainly mad that the rightly educated impenitent cannot possibly answer the wise man’s question.—Miller.
main homiletics of the paragraph.—Verses 21–23.