They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
Ver. 7. They have hands, but they handle not] Curious and artificial (for art is Nature's ape), but useless, and for show only. If Esculapius, or the lady of Loretto, restore the lame or the blind, it is the devil with his lying wonders, 2 Thessalonians 2:9
Feet have they, but they walk not] As those pictures in Plato made by Daedalus, which, if they were not bound, would fly away; or Vulcan's three-footed stools in Homer, which are feigned to have run on wheels of their own accord, to the meeting of the gods, and after that to return in like sort back again. The Tyrians besieged by Alexander chained up their god Hercules, that he might not go from them in that calamnity, and yet they were not delivered.
Neither speak they through their throat] They do not so much as chatter like a crane, or mourn as a dove, Isaiah 38:14, but are dumb idols, as the apostle calleth them. These are things commonly known, but profitably thus inculcated, for the shaming of senseless idolaters; who yet are so bewitched that they will needs dote upon these gods of their own making. O vanas hominum mentes, &c., Oh the spirit of fornication, &c.