His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his bones [that] were not seen stick out.
Ver. 21. His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen] He that was habilior paulo, corpulent and well lined within, as we say, is so pined with long sickness, that you can hardly know him for the same man, and he may well cry out with the prophet, My leanness, my leanness! Of Christ it is said (though not through sickness), that he had "no form nor comeliness" (and yet he was the fairest among men, Psa 45:2), through grief and sufferances, "neither was there any beauty left that we should desire him," for his outside, Isaiah 53:2. And of Mr Fox, the martyrologue, it is reported, that having with infinite pains finished that elaborate work of his, the Acts and Monuments of the Church, in eleven years' time, never using the help of any other man, he grew thereupon so lean and withered, that his friends knew him not (Mr Clark in his Life). Now if sorrow and hard study will so macerate a man, what marvel if long and sharp sickness, and thereby extreme stomachlessness, cause leanness and deformity?
And his bones that were not seen] But could hardly be felt for flesh and fat; now they stick out as in an anatomy, so that you may count them, as also the veins and sinews; his body is become a very bag of bones, a skin bottle in the smoke, as David hath it.