Burning lips and a wicked heart [are like] a potsherd covered with silver dross.
Ver. 23. Burning lips and a wicked heart, &c.] The tongue of the righteous is as fined silver; but glossing lips upon a false heart is no better than dross upon dirt: counterfeit friends are naught on both sides, having os maledictum et cor malum, as Luther renders this text; - a bad mouth, and a worse heart. Wicked men are said to speak with a heart and a heart, Psalms 12:2 , marg. as speaking one thing and thinking another, drawing a fair glove on a foul hand. These are dangerous to be dealt withal; for, like serpents, they can sting without hissing; like cur dogs, suck your blood only with licking, and in the end kill you and cut your throats without biting: so cunning and close are they in the conveyance of their collusion. Squire, sent out of Spain to poison Queen Elizabeth, anointed the pommel of her saddle with poison secretly, and, as it were, doing somewhat else, praying with a loud voice, God save the queen. a When those Romish incendiaries, Gifford, Hodgeson, and others, had set Savage to work to kill the said queen, they first set forth a book to persuade the English Catholics to attempt nothing against her. So Parsons, when he had hatched that nameless villany, the gunpowder plot, set forth his book of Resolution, as if he had been wholly made up of devotion. Caveatur osculum Iscarioticum. Betware the mouth of Judus. It is the property of a godly man to speak the truth from his heart. Psa 15:2
a Camden's Elizabeth, 57.