A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land [is] as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
Ver. 3. A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth] Such waste these vermin shall make, like as it is said of the Great Turk, that wherever he sets his foot there never grows grass again; he doth so eat up the countries where he comes with his huge armies. And the late Lord Brook, in his discourse of episcopacy, notes, that that unhappy proverb among us was not for nought, The bishop's foot hath trodden here. In Biscay, a province of Spain, they admit no bishops to come among them; and when Ferdinand, the Catholic king, came in progress hither, accompanied among others by the Bishop of Pampelune, the people arose in arms, drove back the bishop, and gathering all the dust on the which they thought he had trodden, flung it into the sea. What fires they kindled here in Queen Mary's days, devouring six or seven hundred, at least, of God's faithful witnesses in five years' time; and what work they made in our remembrance throughout the three kingdoms, to the embroiling of all and their own utter ruin, I need not relate. That renowned author cited before had told them time enough, but that they were destined to destruction, that if they forbear to touch the supreme authority of the land, which they affected, it was but as once Mercury spared Jupiter's thunderbolts, which he dared not steal, lest they should roar too loud, or, at least, burn his fingers.
The land is as the garden of Eden] i.e. of all kind of pleasures and delights. See Genesis 2:8; Genesis 13:10. Eden inde ηδονη. Strabo speaks spitefully of the land of Canaan, as if it were a dry, stony, and barren country, not worth the seeking after, Rabshakeh shows more ingenuity than this, Strabus et pravus Strabo (as one therefore calleth him), 2 Kings 18:32. Tacitus commends it for a fertile soil, so doth Pliny; but above all, the holy Scripture setteth it forth to be Sumen totius orbis, the bread basket of the whole world, a land flowing with milk and honey, &c., Exodus 3:17 Deuteronomy 32:13 .
And behind them a desolate wilderness] Not such a wilderness as yielded pastures, and habitations for shepherds, Joel 1:19,20, but utterly desolate, and therefore unhabitable, as under the torrid zone. No place can be so pleasant but sin can lay it waste. "A fruitful land turneth the Lord into barrenness for the wickedness of them that dwell therein," Psalms 107:34. There is no footstep left to this day of that gallant garden, planted by God himself; or if any, cecidit rosa, est spina; the place remains in the upper part of Chaldea, but not the pleasantness of the place. The like we may say of Sodom, of Jerusalem, of Greece, of Asia the less, of Germany, Ireland, &c. England hath hitherto subsisted merely by a miracle of God's mercy, and by a prop of his extraordinary patience. The Lord continue it to the glory of his name and the good of his poor people. Fiat, fiat.