But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.
Ver. 15. But if ye bite, &c.] Si collidimnr, frangimur, If we clash, we break. Dissolution is the daughter of dissension, saith Nazienzen. The Turks pray to God to keep the Christians at variance. Israelites in Egypt vexed one another; and Christians, as if they lacked enemies, fly in one another's faces. This is a sad foretoken of a deadly consumption. a When the Eastern Churches were all to pieces among themselves, in came the Goths and Vandals, and afterward the Turks and Tartars. b When the French Churches began to jangle and jar about discipline, God suffered the Parisian massacre. Our present hideous dissensions (like those civil wars of Rome- nullos habitura triumphos, not any will hold a triumph. Lucan), do as plainly foretell the removing of our candlestick, in case we repent not, as if we had received letters from heaven to that purpose. We read in our chronicles, that those who were born in England in the year after the great mortality, A. D. 1349, wanted some of their cheek teeth. Men seem to have more now than usual; there was never such biting and snarling. England is a mighty animal (saith a great politician), which can never die except it kill itself. And to the same purpose the Lord Rich in a speech to the justices in King Edward VI's days, "Never foreign power (saith he) could yet hurt, or in any part prevail in this realm, but by disobedience and misorder among themselves. That is the way wherewith God will plague us if he mind to punish us. And so long as we do agree among ourselves, we may be sure that God is with us, and that foreign power shall not prevail against us."
a Camer. Med. Hist. cent. 2.
b Melch. Adam. in Vita Bulling.