The way of life [is] above to the wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.
Ver. 24. The way of life is above to the wise.] He goes a higher way than his neighbour, even in his common businesses, because they are done in faith and obedience. He hath his feet where other men's heads are, and, like a heavenly eagle, delights himself in high flying. Busied he may be in mean, low things, but not satisfied in them as adequate objects. A wise man may sport with children, but that is not his business. Domitian spent his time in catching flies, and Artaxerxes in making hafts for knives; but that was the baseness of their spirits. Wretched worldlings make it their work to gather wealth, as children do to tumble a snowball; they are scattered abroad throughout all the land - as those poor Israelites were Exo 5:12 to gather stubble - not without an utter neglect of their poor souls. But what, I wonder, will these men do when death shall come with a writ of habeas corpus, You may have the body, and the devil with a writ of habeas animam, you may have the soul - when the cold grave shall have their bodies, and hot hell hold their souls? Oh that they that have their hands elbow deep in the earth, that are rooting and digging in it, as if they would that way dig themselves a new and a nearer way to hell! oh that these greedy moles, these insatiate muckworms, would be warned to flee from the wrath to come, to take heed of hell beneath, and not sell their souls to the devil for a little pelf, as they say Pope Sylvester did for seven years' enjoyment of the popedom! Oh that they would meditate every day a quarter of an hour, as Francis Xaverius counselled John king of Portugal, on that divine sentence, "What shall it profit a man to win the whole world, and lose his own soul?" He should be a loser by the sale of his soul; he should be - that which he so much feared to be - a beggar, begging in vain, though but for a drop of cold water to cool his tongue.