For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries:
Ver. 3. For the time past of our life may suffice us] We may every one say with Austin, Nimis sero te amavi Domine. It should be a burden to our souls that we begin no sooner to love God.
In lasciviousness, lusts, &c.] The true picture of a pagan conversation, which yet is too common among those that call themselves Christians. The world is now grown perfectly profane, and can play on the Lord's day without book; making it as Bacchus' orgies, rather than God's holy day, with piping, dancing, drinking, drabbing, &c. We may say as once Alsted of his Germans, that if the Sabbath Day should be named according to their observing of it, Daemoniacus potius quam Dominicus diceretur, it should be called not God's day, but the devil's.
Excess of wine] οινοφλυγιαις, or, red and rich faces, as they call them.
Revellings] κωμοις, stinks, saith the Syriac; drunkards are stinkards; as Luther called the Swenckfeldians, stink-feldians, from the ill savour of their opinions. Tacitus tells us that among the old Germans, it was no disgrace counted to continue drinking and spewing night and day, Diem noctemque continuare potando.
Banquetings] Gr. ποτοις, compotations, or good fellow meetings; some render it bibbings, sippings, tipplings, sitting long at it, though not to an alienation of the mind. How much more when they leave not till they have drank the three "outs" first; viz. Wit out of the head, money out of the purse, and ale out of the pot!
And abominable idolatries] Some idolatries then, say the Papists, are not abominable. A sweet inference. That all Papists are idolaters, Dr Reynolds hath plainly and plentifully proved in his learned work De idololatria Romana, never yet answered. Weston writeth that his head ached in reading it. But what a poor shift is that of Vasquez, expressly to maintain that the second commandment belonged to the Jews only; as holding it impossible to answer our arguments against their image worship? Other Popish writers utterly disannul the second commandment, making it a member of the first; and so, retaining the words, they destroy the sense and interpretation.