Drought and heat consume the snow waters: [so doth] the grave [those which] have sinned.
Ver. 19. Drought and heat consume the snow waters] Here also brevity hath bred obscurity. Snow waters, as they are more subtile, so they sooner sink into the dry earth; so die the wicked, quickly and easily. See Job 21:13; Job 21:31. There are that read the whole verse thus, In the drought and heat they rob, and in the snow waters; they sin to the grave; that is, they rob (and run into other flagitious practices) in all weather, summer and winter, and never stop till they die. They persist in their sins (saith Calvin) wherein they have been muzzled up, even to their grave. This is a good sense. Luther tells of one filthy adulterer, so set upon that sin that he was heard to utter these abominable words, If I were sure to live here for ever, and that I might still be carried from one brothel house to another, I would never desire any other heaven than that. Vae dementiae, et impietati. This beastly man breathed out his wretched soul between two harlots. Once I knew a most odious adulterer of seventy years old (saith another great divine, Mr Dan. Roger) who having wasted his flesh and state with harlots, and lying near death, was requested thus, Potter, call upon God; he replied, with his ordinary oaths, Pox (boils) and wounds, is this a time to pray? I knew (saith a third reverend man, Mr Bolton), a great swearer, who coming to his death bed, Satan so filled his heart with a maddened and enraged greediness after sin, that though himself swore as fast and as furiously as he could, yet (as though he had been already among the bannings and blasphemies of hell) he desperately desired the bystanders to help him with oaths, and to swear for him. Athenaeus reporteth of one covetous mammonist, that at the hour of his death he devoured many pieces of gold, and sewed the rest in his coat, commanding that they should be all buried with him. And our chroniclers write of King Edward I that he adjured his son and nobles, that if he died in his expedition against Bruce, king of Scots, they should not inter his corpse, but carry it about Scotland, till they had avenged him on that usurper (Dan. Hist. 201).