And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
Ver. 5. And he cast down the pieces of silver] That wage of wickedness burnt in his purse, in his conscience; neither could it secure him in the day of wrath. See Zephaniah 1:18; Ezekiel 7:19; Oba 1:4 James 4:1,2. Omnia fui, et nihil mihi profitit, I had everything and it profited my nothing, said Severus the emperor, when he lay dying. Most of the emperors got nothing by their advancement to the empire, whereof they were so ambitious, but this, Ut citius interficerentur, that they were slain the sooner. All, or most of them, till Constantine, died unnatural deaths. Achan's wedge of gold served but to cleave asunder his soul from his body; and the Babylonish garment but for a shroud.
And went and hanged himself] If you confess yourself to a priest, and not to God, said that martyr, you shall have the reward that Judas had. For he confessed himself to a priest, and yet went and hanged himself by-and-by. So did Porter, townclerk of London in Henry VIII's time, who had before sworn a great oath, that if the king's highness would set forth the Scripture in English, and let it be read of the people by his authority, rather than he would so long live, he would cut his own throat. But he brake promise: for shortly after he hanged himself. And about the same time, Foxford, chancellor to the bishop of London, a cruel persecutor and butcher of the saints, died suddenly in his chair, his belly being burst, and his guts falling out before him; as likewise Judas' did, Cum quodam singulari crepitus fragore, as the word ελακησε imports, Acts 1:18. Selneccerus makes mention of a covetous bishop of Misna in Germany, who had the devil for his death's man. And Dr Morton, late bishop of Durham, reports a story of his own knowledge, of one Sir Booth, a Bachelor of Arts in St John's College in Cambridge, who, being popishly affected, took the consecrated bread at the time of the communion; and forbearing to eat it, conveyed and kept it closely for a time, and afterwards threw it over the college wall. But a short time after, not enduring the torment of his guilty conscience, he threw himself headlong over the battlements of the chapel, and some few hours after ended his life. "The spirit of a man may sustain his infirmity:" some shift or other a man may make to suffer whatsoever other calamities, "but a wounded spirit who can bear?"Proverbs 18:14 : there is no fighting with a mighty fire, no bearing up sail against a storm. Job, when once wet to the skin, curseth the day of his birth, and thinketh it better to be strangled or hanged than longer to endure it, Job 7:15. And yet God was but in jest, as it were, with Job, in comparison of Judas.