Because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the wellfavoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.
Ver. 4. Because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the wellfavoured harlot] Specious, and therefore gracious with her paramours; of a fair countenance, but foul condition; like Aurelia Orestilla, that had beauty, but no good property, Cuius prater formam nihil unquam bonus laudavit (Sallust.). Chrysippus called beauty the flower of virtue; but that is not generally true. Diogenes saw cause to say to some fair women in his time, O quam bona domus, sed malus hospes, Here is a fair house, but an ill inhabitant. Nineveh is the well favoured harlot here spoken of; her very name signifieth a fair habitation. Jerome and others interpret it, she was indeed urbs formosa et famosa, fair and famous, but foolish and filthy. Meretrix meretricissima; she multiplied her whoredoms, both corporal and spiritual; for these are seldom sundered; as we see in that once well favoured, but now withered, whore of Rome, Revelation 17:1. Roma inverted is amor; preposterous love, unnatural filthiness, is there as commonly practised as idolatry. And as a common harlot paints and decks herseff to please her lovers, so did Nineveh, so doth Rome in her pompous and men-pleasing worships. I have read of a lady in Paris, that when she saw the bravery of a procession to a saint she cried out, Oh, how fine is our religion beyond that of the Huguenots! And Sir Walter Raleigh was wont to say, that were he to choose a religion for fleshly liberty and lasciviousness, he would choose Popery, which is indeed an alluring, tempting, bewitching religion, none like it.
The mistress of witchcrafts] Harlots are many of them enchantresses; and have their philtra, their love potions, wherewith to ensnare men, and to draw them on to lewdness, and to take away their hearts, Hosea 4:11. Athenaeus brings in Plato bewailing himself, that he was taken so much with a filthy harlot. And Aelian tells of a whore that boasted to Socrates that she could easily get followers from him, not he from her. Of Samson and Hercules (whom some think to have been the same) those two verses verified,
“ Nam potuit lenam, potuit superare leaenam:
Quem fera non potuit vincere; vicit hera. ”
Think the same of idolatry also, and of those sorceries, whereby the purple whore hath deceived all nations, as St John (in allusion to this place) saith of her, Revelation 18:23 ; for in that book of the Revelation the Holy Ghost borrows all the elegance and flowers in the story of the Old Testament, thereby to set out the story of the New in succeeding ages.
That selleth nations through her whoredoms ] Maketh prize of them, as those impostors did, 2 Timothy 3:6 , and then make sale of them as her slaves, 2 Peter 2:3 , or otherwise use them at her pleasure, as homely as the whore of Babylon now doth those her slaves and souls of men, Revelation 18:13 , whom she sits upon, even upon peoples, nations, multitudes, and tongues, Revelation 17:15 , tyrannizing over their consciences, and appointing them to very mean offices, as that posture of hers, in sitting upon them, seemeth to import.