Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded: let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed: bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction.
Ver. 18. Let them be confounded.] A heavy imprecation. Let persecutors take heed how they move ministers to make intercession to God against them, as Elias did against Israel; Rom 11:2 as Jeremiah here and elsewhere doth against the Jews; as the Christian churches did against Julian the apostate. God will set to his fiat.
Let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed.] Paveant illi et non paveam ego, so the Vulgate Latin hath it. But what a stupid Latin dolt was that Popish priest who alleged to his parishioners this text, to prove, that not he, but they, were to pave the church way! So another of them, finding it written in the end of Paul's epistles, Missa est, &c., bragged he had found the mass in his Bible. So another, reading John 1:44, Invenimus Messiam, we have found the Messiah, made the same conclusion.