Men groan from out of the city, and the soul of the wounded crieth out: yet God layeth not folly to them. Men groan from out of the city - This is a new paragraph. After having shown the oppressions carried on in the country, he takes a view of those carried on in the town. Here the miseries are too numerous to be detailed. The poor in such places are often in the most wretched state; they are not only badly fed, and miserably clothed, but also most unwholesomely lodged. I was once appointed with a benevolent gentleman, J. S., Esq., to visit a district in St. Giles's London, to know the real state of the poor. We took the district in House Row, and found each dwelling full of people, dirt, and wretchedness. Neither old nor young had the appearance of health: some were sick, and others lying dead, in the same place! Several beds, if they might be called such, on the floor in the same apartment; and, in one single house, sixty souls! These were groaning under various evils; and the soul of the wounded, wounded in spirit, and afflicted in body, cried out to God and man for help! It would have required no subtle investigation to have traced all these miseries to the doors, the hands, the lips, and the hearts, of ruthless landlords; or to oppressive systems of public expenditure in the support of ruinous wars, and the stagnation of trade and destruction of commerce occasioned by them: to which must be added the enormous taxation to meet this expenditure.
Yet God layeth not folly to them - He does not impute their calamities to their own folly. Or, according to the Vulgate, Et Deus inultum abire non patitur; "And God will not leave (these disorders) unpunished." But the Hebrew may be translated And God doth not attend to their prayers. Job's object was to show, in opposition to the mistaken doctrine of his friends, that God did not hastily punish every evil work, nor reward every good one. That vice often went long unpunished, and virtue unrewarded; and that we must not judge of a man's state either by his prosperity or adversity. Therefore, there might be cases in which the innocent oppressed poor were crying to God for a redress of their grievances, and were not immediately heard; and in which their oppressors were faring sumptuously every day, without any apparent mark of the Divine displeasure. These sentiments occur frequently.