"My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding. that thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honey-comb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them. Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth. Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house: lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel: lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger; and thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed, and say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly. Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad. and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger? For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings. His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray."
The whole of this chapter, the latter half of the sixth, and all the seventh, relate to one subject; a subject on which Solomon had before merely touched in general terms. It is a subject which admits not, in a public assembly, of minute illustration, and to which frequent recurrence is not desirable. It is, at the same time, a subject, from which, when I think of the frequency and earnestness of Solomon's warnings respecting it, and the amount of real peril to souls which it involves, I should feel myself chargeable with a criminal abandonment of duty, were I for a moment to shrink.
I take the entire subject at once, as presented in the passages to which I have referred-passages which it is impossible to read without sentiments of deep abhorrence of the sins that are there portrayed in their native deformity and mournful results; and without melting compassion for the wretched victims of profligacy and licentious indulgence.
And this, I may here remark in general, is the character of all those passages in the divine word which relate to similar subjects. Were such topics altogether unnoticed, there would be an unaccountable defect of faithfulness in a professed communication from God, and a communication of which the main design is to save souls from death. How strange would it have been-how contrary to every conception we can form of divine fidelity and kindness-had warning been withheld where most it was needed; had the rocks which exposed to the most imminent hazard in the voyage of life been left without a beacon-light; and the eternal destinies of immortal beings sacrificed to any principle of false and misnamed delicacy!
"Thy word is very pure" says the Psalmist, "therefore thy servant loveth it." That word is like the God from whom it comes. It is light of Light. In itself pure, it is the detecter and exposer of all impurity; and, while detecting and exposing it, it condemns it by its authority, and by its influence cleanses it away. I am aware that infidels have attempted to fasten on this blessed book-the Bible, a charge of a very contrary tendency. They have selected particular portions of it, and, with light-hearted sportiveness or with sarcastic bitterness, have made them the grounds of this most calumnious charge. I call it so without the slightest hesitation. First of all, who are the men who thus object? If they are in earnest, they ought to be persons of singularly pure and holy character; evidently and deeply concerned for the interests of religion and virtue; shrinking with sensitive dread from all that is immoral, and solicitous to preserve all others from the taint. And is the reason why they do not come to the Bible really an apprehension of having their moral principles contaminated, and their spiritual sensibilities impaired? Their consciences tell them the contrary. The passages, moreover, which they are fond of selecting, are all of them, as every one must be sensible, of a complexion totally different from that of voluptuous writing, with its sly inuendoes, its covert insinuations, its artfully studied refinements, its enticing and passion-stirring scenes. And their effect is the very opposite. They are, throughout, so manifestly and strongly marked with the very contrary design-to set forth impressively the evil and the danger of all sin; with the divine abhorrence of it, and the revealed and threatened indignation of God against it;-or, it may be, from the chaste and cheerful endearments of connubial life, to unfold the happiness of communion with God, and His condescension and kindness in admitting his sinful creatures to the enjoyment of it. Who, O who ever had recourse to the Bible for the stimulation of sinful passion, or the encouragement of licentious indulgence? Is it not the book from which the licentious ever shrink? which they cannot bear? which opposes, and thwarts, and condemns, and torments them? which they are glad to keep out of their thoughts, and which they are fain to laugh at because they feel it wounds them, and are too proud and bent on their vices to acknowledge the wound? If the contrary were true-if the charge of infidelity were well-founded, we might expect to find the Bible on the table of the man of pleasure,-the favourite vade-mecum of the gay and voluptuous libertine. But the very hatred with which bad men regard it; the very care with which they shun it, shows that it is not really to their mind; that it bears witness against them, shows them no countenance, but consigns them and their ways to reprobation and destruction. And while they pretend to speak against it, their conduct belies their words. If they spoke the truth, they would say-what, after all, most of them do say-that it is too pure for them, too strict, too damnatory of all evil. Were it not pure, the impure would like it. Were it not the uncompromising enemy of sin, it would not find an enemy, as it does, in the sinner. And when, as has sometimes happened, a youth who has had a Bible education, who has been trained in the knowledge of its contents, and has, for a time, conformed to its instructions, imbibes the principles of scepticism, lays it by, and betakes himself, instead of the apostles of the Lamb, to the apostles of infidelity-what is the result? Is it a sterner virtue? Is it a more pious deportment? Is it a purer chastity? Is it a more uncompromising integrity-a more home-loving sobriety-a more consistent and selfdenying devotedness to God? Alas! is not the answer written in the bitter tears of many a parent and of many a friend-of many a brother, and of many a "wife of youth?" Beware, my young friends, of all those flimsy reasonings by which the deceitful heart so often imposes on the judgment, and, though it cannot satisfy, silences the conscience. And beware of all that might tempt you to think lightly of the sins here denounced. They may not, nay, they do not, exclude from what is called the best society. You may hear them without their being directly named, spoken of as juvenile indiscretions and irregularities. You may hear many a time, with an affected compassion, but with very gentle terms of condemnation, of good-natured, good-hearted, good-dispositioned, fine, honest, open fellows, that are nobody's enemies but their own: and from the tone of leniency and indulgence in which their vices are spoken of, it seems as if it were scarcely believed that they were even their own! But indeed they are their own; and they are more-they are the very worst enemies of all about them. They are only the more dangerous on account of the very qualities for which they are commended, and which produce the palliation of their vices. Let me warn you against such palliation, and every thing that tends to it. Take, I pray you, the Bible account of these vices. It will, in the end, be found the true one. Conscience even now more than whispers that it will. O let not the truth be left to be discovered when it is too late!
What was said of evil company in general in Pro_4:14-15, is here applied to this kind of company in particular, verses Pro_5:5-8. "Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them. Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth. Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house." The meaning, as before, is-Flee temptation. He that "trusteth to his own heart," and fancies he may go certain lengths with evil-doers, and retreat with safety, "is a fool." He has yet to learn the heaven-taught lesson, "know Thyself." Thoughts are the germs of actions: "guard well your thoughts." Words cherish thoughts and quicken evil desires. Speak them not. Hear them not. Stop your ear like the deaf adder. Listen not to the "voice of the charmer." To open your ear is to have your memory, your imagination, your heart polluted, and thus your stability undermined.
In the passages before us, the consequences of sinful indulgence-of a course of libertinism, are very vividly depicted. Thus, verses Pro_5:9-10. "Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel: lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger." These are some of the temporal consequences. A life of profligacy exposes him who enters upon it, to merciless unrelenting avarice; makes him the pitiable dupe of those whose sole object it is to fleece him,-to make the most of him, and then, with a sneer, to abandon him. It transfers his substance to the vilest, the most odious and worthless of human beings; to the most indifferent, selfish, hard-hearted strangers; who are all friendship while profit can be made, but are alienated the moment it ceases.
The temporal effects are still more fearful, when the wicked voluptuary is himself the head of a family-a husband and a father; or when the wretched partner of his guilt is such-a wife and a mother. Oh! of what unutterable domestic misery has this sin been the prolific parent! How many hearts has it broken-of wives, and husbands, and children! What anguish, and resentment, and alienation, and discord, and blood, has it caused! What scorpions has it thrown into the family circle!-what infuriated and vengeful pride, or what heart-sinking melancholy that refuses to be comforted and hastens to the grave! And to what poverty, and desolation, and squalid wretchedness has it reduced its victims!" For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread: and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life," Pro_6:26.
The manner in which this crime is treated by the laws of our country is a disgrace to our jurisprudence. Solomon says-"Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when ho is hungry," Pro_6:30. Yet this thief may be tried, convicted, imprisoned, transported; and, till the recent happy improvements in our sanguinary criminal code, I might have said executed. And what is done to the wretch who has torn the hearts, ruined the reputation, and annihilated the peace, and comfort, and joy of individuals and of families, in a way where to talk of reparation is only to add insult to injury! The wretch escapes with a pecuniary mulct under the execrable designation of damages! Can there any thing be imagined more base and sordid?-any thing more fitted to hold out temptations to worthless husbands to set a price on female honour; to encourage the wealthy profligate; and-by converting a crime of the most atrocious moral turpitude into a mere civil offence, for which compensation may be made in a certain amount of pounds, shillings, and pence-to pervert all the moral feelings of the community? Such a mode of viewing and treating the crime has, beyond question, contributed to diminish its turpitude, to augment its melancholy frequency among the higher circles of society, and in a great degree to obliterate its infamy: so that cases of this nature come to be read and spoken of, not with the feelings of indignant and unutterable loathing, as they ever ought to be, but with the coolness of commercial calculation, and the inquiry, What damages?-what laid, and what granted? It is disgusting and sickening to think of it!
Further, dissipation tends to the ruin of both body and soul:-verses Pro_5:11-14. "And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed, and say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly." The apostle Paul says, "Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body: but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body," 1Co_6:18. This is one of those evils to which a just God, in his righteous providence, has affixed, in its temporal consequences, the brand of his reprobation and abhorrence. How many a healthy and robust frame has a life of profligacy and dissipation wasted away and brought to a premature grave!
How inexpressibly pitiable the scene here described-"Lest thou mourn at the last!" It is a scene that has many a time been realized on the deathbed of the wasted debauchee. The fixed and sunken eye, the parched, pale, and quivering lip, the cold and dewy brow, the livid countenance, and all the ghastly appearances of death-O! these are nothing, compared with the torture of an awakened conscience, with the anguish of a "wounded spirit" preying upon his vitals! Often is this agony of regret experienced, when there is no repentance-no true sorrow for sin, or wish to forsake it; when there is mere concern that the time of indulgence is past, and that the time of recompense is come. Then the poor sinner curses his irreparable folly, and amidst the present pangs of dissolution, anticipates, with a tortured and desperate spirit, the future and the worse torments of hell!-for the Soul is the ruined victim of such a life, as well as the body. It ruins both. "Her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell." "Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul." "He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks; till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life."-Pro_5:4-5; Pro_6:32; Pro_7:22-23.
From this ruin there is no escape. Sin may have been committed in secresy. No human eye may have seen it. But there is an eye from which it cannot be concealed-"For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings." "There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves." "All things are naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." God is no inattentive or unconcerned spectator of your actions. "He pondereth all your goings." He weighs every word, every deed, every thought of the mind, every imagination and every desire of the heart, in the balance of that law which is "holy, and just, and good." The Lord will "bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing." The sinner is as certain of being brought to trial and to punishment, as if his sins themselves were cords and chains, that reserved him in awful safe-keeping to the day of wrath-the "day of the revelation of the righteous judgment of God:" "His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray," verses Pro_5:22-23.
The certainty of a result corresponding to the course of sin, is strongly expressed by the figures in Pro_6:27-28: "Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burnt? Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burnt?" This is fearfully true in regard to divine retribution. He who persists in sin, and expects impunity, acts as unreasonably as the man who should expose his body to the scorching flame, or walk over burning fire, and expect to escape uninjured!
It is an affecting and alarming fact, that despisers of the counsels of heavenly wisdom most generally, after persisting for a length of time, die as they have lived. This is the sentiment in verse twenty-third-"They die without instruction." Mistake me not. I say not that there is any season when repentance toward God is impossible, or when, if genuine, it can come too late. No; blessed be God-
"While the lamp holds on to burn,
The vilest sinner may return."
I speak of matter of fact. Generally, such persons go on in sin, refuse instruction, and put away from them to the end, whether in scorn or in sad despair, all the invitations, assurances, and promises of the gospel. This sounds an awful warning to dissipated youth. Some of them (for there are not many so hardened and daring as to determine they will never repent and never change) may be flattering themselves, that at some future day they will take thought and amend. But alas! for the infatuated anticipation. By persistence in sin they are every day fastening its cords about them with increasing firmness, and rendering change the more unlikely. The indisposition to good grows. The conscience hardens. The heart becomes more and more callous; and they go astray to the last in "the greatness of their folly;"-a folly, of which the end shows the amount. The lesson is read-the tremendous lesson-by the flames of Hell! There the regret, so vividly depicted, in the verses already under review, as characterizing the close of even this life, shall be experienced in its most agonizing form; and shall constitute no small portion of the torture inflicted by "the worm that never dies!"
O then, my hearers-my youthful hearers in a special manner-listen, and beware. I have spoken to young men. But on both sides, the ruin is equal: and the number of those wretched corrupters of the morals of our youth who live by the wages of iniquity is, in great cities and towns, unspeakably deplorable. He must have the heart of a monster; he must be one from whose heart the obduracy of vice has wrung out the very last warm drops of humanity, who can contemplate the evil in all the extent of its consequences, without horror and self-loathing at the part he may himself have had in producing it. And such considerations should recommend to liberal support every legitimate means of mitigating its amount, and of rescuing any of its miserable victims from the fatal effects of sin in time and eternity-"plucking them as brands from the burning!"
As a preventive of evil, and as a means of true happiness, Solomon recommends early marriage, and the experience of the comforts and joys of connubial and domestic life:-verses Pro_5:15-18. "Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth."
It is evident, that this must be understood with reservation. It requires the application of prudence, and the prospective consideration of the question, how a family is to be supported. Much unhappiness often arises from overlooking and disregarding this. The most virtuous and ardent affection must not be encouraged to set at nought entirely the dictates of discretion. But in general, and with a proper degree of attention to this, early unions are, in many respects, of eminent advantage. Virtuous love operates with a most salutary restraint on the vicious principles of our fallen nature. The marriage union, formed and maintained on right principles, has ever been found a fountain of the purest and richest joy on this side the grave-joy unmingled with guilty shame, and that leaves behind it no tormenting sting. There are few things more pleasing than to see youth joined to youth in virtuous and honourable and hallowed union,-living together in all the faithfulness and all the tenderness of a first love. O! with what delight does the eye rest on such a scene, when disgusted with the loathsomeness, and distressed by the misery of vice!
It is a circumstance deserving notice, that, although Solomon himself had fearfully trespassed against the original law of marriage-the constitution authoritatively fixed when God made a male and a female, and said, "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife,"-he here proceeds, in his admonitions and counsels, according to the provisions of that constitution. It was the law from the first, and is the law under the Christian economy, that "every man should have his own wife, and every woman her own husband." Solomon had himself reaped the bitter fruits of departure from that law; and so, though not to the same degree, had many before him.
I conclude by reminding every one that all sin tends to ruin. The indulgence of one sin cannot be compensated by abstinence from another. There is no such principle of compensation in the Bible. And yet, nothing is more frequent in regard to sinful indulgences, than for men to-
"Compound for those they are inclined to,
By cursing those they have no mind to."
Such is the delusion which men, in this respect, are accustomed to practise on themselves, that, even in regard to propensities that are absolutely opposites, in the nature of things incapable of being indulged together, they may be found, while giving themselves up to the one, pluming themselves on the absence of the other!
Again: mere external sobriety and chastity and general decency of character, is not enough. There is still remaining the all-important question-What is the principle of it? The only sound principle is-"the fear of God." In all schemes that have for their object the outward reformation of men-their restoration from the habits of outward vicious indulgence-it were well that this be kept in mind; for if you succeed in making men externally sober, while they do not become internally godly, and if they are encouraged to rely upon their outward reformation and to make a righteousness of it, you may essentially benefit them in their corporeal and temporal well-being, but you fail of saving their souls. They may have a fair reputation amongst their fellowmen; but in God's balance they must be found wanting.
