Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned [against] thy soul.
Ver. 10. Thou hast consulted shame to thy house, &c.] Thou hast taken a wrong course both for thy house of the kingdom (so the Persians called the king's palace, Dan 4:27), which shall be blown up; and for thine own private family and posterity; it is not all thy care, pains, plotting, and practising that can preserve it from ignominy and utter ruin. God will turn thy glory into shame, and make thy name to rot and stink as putrified flesh, Proverbs 10:7; Proverbs 10:9, "He that perverteth his ways shall be known." And when such a man is raked up in the dust his evil courses shall be cast as dung in the faces of those whom he leaveth behind him. What fools, then, are extortioners, muckworms, and cormorants, that live miserably and deal unjustly, opening the mouths of all to cry out upon their craftiness, covetousness, and cruelty, and yet think to raise up their houses and advance their names, and adorn their children with glory and estimation?
By cutting off many people] A poor glory it was to Sulla to have made such a merciless massacre at Athens (σφαγη ανηλεης), and after that, to have proscribed and slain 4700 citizens of Rome, as he caused it to be publicly recorded, videlicet ne memoria tam praeclarae rei dilueretur, saith mine author. So for Julius Caesar to have been the death of a million of men, Mahomet, the Great Turk, of 800,000. So for Stokesly, Bishop of London, to boast upon his deathbed that he had in his time brought to the fire 50 heretics, as he called them; or, for the bloody Spaniards, that they have murdered 50,000,000 of Indians in 42 years, as Acosta the Jesuit testifieth.
And hast sinned against thy soul] The worth whereof is incomparable, the loss irreparable, as Christ (who only went to the price of souls) telleth us, Matthew 16:26. It was therefore no ill counsel that Francis Xaverius gave John III, King of Portugal, to meditate every day a quarter of an hour on that Divine sentence, What shall it profit a man to win the world, and lose his soul? Neither was it any evil answer that Maximilian (King of Bohemia, afterwards emperor) gave the Pope, who persuaded him to be a good Catholic with many promises of profits and preferments; the king answered, I thank your Holiness, but my soul's health is dearer to me than all the things in the world. This pleased not the Pope, who said that it was a Lutheran form of speech; and yet that of Lewis, King of France, about the year 1152, pleased him much worse, who cast his bulls (whereby he required the fruits of vacancies of all cathedral churches of France) into the fire, saying, I had rather the Pope's bulls should roast in the fire than that my soul should fry in hell.