1. It is a conquering sin, for it hath overcome the strongest.
2. It is a cheating sin, for, instead of repentance, it works the adulterer to labour a concealment. Instead of clearing their sin, they labour to cloak it.
3. It is a commanding sin; no iniquity that stands in the way must be refused if adultery be once admitted.
4. It is a condemning sin, and carries its own sentence about it. It must needs abandon all love of God, for that and the love of a harlot cannot stand together. As malice is damnable, because it is so diametrically repugnant to God who is love; so God is also purity, and therefore nothing more directly contrary to Him than uncleanness.
I. Their eyes be the beagles that hunt after the game.
1. There is no sense which is not at the heart’s command; but the principality of those servants is varied according to the disposition of their mistress. If the heart be gracious, the ear hath the superiority; if vicious, the eye.
2. The eye is of all senses the quickest of apprehension--a port to land the commodities of hell before the soul have warning.
3. The eye is the pander of a lustful heart; the window that lets in the infection, the first betrayer of the fort. Pliny writes of a chalky brimstone that draws to itself distant fire: the wanton eye attracts this adulterous fire to the heart. Alexander refused so much as to see Darius’s wife, a lady of incomparable beauty, fearing lest he that had conquered the husband should be overcome by the wife.
4. Satan’s first project is to take the eye; if that be once his friend, he hopes well of all the rest. Indeed, if the door stand open to the thief, what safety can be in the house?
5. Where be the eyes that have not been faulty? If the eyes have sinned, why should not the eyes be punished? Oh, let those eyes that have been the cisterns of corruption become the fountains of compunction!
II. “adultery” is the game, the beast they hunt.
1. The main attractive of the eye is beauty, and of this the fancy is informed by the eye; yet being so informed, then the eye is ruled by the fancy, and as that imagines her, so the eye sees her. Many a woman’s beauty hath been her ruin; but blessing never forsook a beautiful soul.
2. But if a man’s eye be delighted with beauty, may he not enjoy it with chastity? What a laborious, what a dangerous way the lustful finds out to his pleasure!
3. It is an adulteress they love, and that is but one bow short of Satan. We hate the Turks for selling Christians as slaves. How odious are they that sell themselves!
III. “full of adultery”--this is the pursuit of the game, full cry. The eyes do not engross all their uncleanness; they are not only full, and the other parts empty. The caterer fills his basket with provision, but this serves afterward to fill the mouth and to fill the stomach. Theeyes be first full, as the cistern; but the cistern serves all other offices of the house. Nor is this a fulness of satisfaction, for as “he that loveth silver shall never be satisfied with silver,” so he that loves women shall never be satisfied with women. Unnatural desires are infinite: hunger is soon appeased with meat, and thirst allayed with drink; but in burning fevers, the more water is drunk, the more it is thirsted for. “Full.” There is no mediocrity in sin: in extremes can be no mean; and every sin is an extreme, either deficient or excessive. (Thos. Adams.)
That cannot cease from sin--
The fixity of habit
Having eyes full of an adulteress.” All who possess eyes at all have them full of something. I have heard one of exquisite aesthetic sensibility, who had seen some of the glorious painted glass at St. Gudule, in Brussels, on a summer day, declare that for days his eyes were “full of those colours, especially the blue.” The eye of the woman of “meek and quiet spirit,” wherever circumstances may lead her, is full of love. Even so the sensualist’s eye is “full of an adulteress,” filled full, so that it can hold no more. The eyes are fixed in an evil expression which they can never lose. They give signal to all whom it concerns that they are ever on the watch. That which is choke-full often means, in the original, satiated. But such eyes are insatiate and insatiable. This is one of God’s terrible voices of mortal judgment, one of those hints which tell us what a man may become. Let us consider that law of human character which is the foundation of the law of Divine punishment, without which, indeed, the latter cannot be spiritually construed to the spiritual nature. Character, then, as the derivation of the word implies, has a tendency to become, and frequently does become, absolutely stereotyped, from a practical point of view. Generally speaking, up to a certain date, a man may issue a second edition of his moral life, revised and corrected, perhaps even entirely recast. Still a day comes when the second edition, with the “errata” expunged, is not possible any longer. The eye once “full of an adulteress “may be filled with dust, but the ineradicable image has been carried to, and abides for ever in, that “inward eye,” which is the “bliss “or bane, the heaven or hell of “solitude.” This is a solemn argument for youth, when the vapour of imagination and passion are beginning to condense into habit; for that portion of manhood during which habit is becoming of insoluble density. Let us beware of the lust of the eyes. Be ours the prayer, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken Thou me in Thy way.” Nor let any who ponders this argument turn from it with a sigh of despair, “For me it is too late.” If we have enough of will left to desire earnestly a new mind, it is not too late. Such can still hear the voice--“Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.” (Abp. Wm. Alexander.)
Covetous practices.
Covetousness
Some of us may remember the fable of a covetous man, who chanced to find his way one moonlight night into a fairy’s palace. There he saw bars, apparently of solid gold, strewed on every side, and he was permitted to take away as many as he could carry. In the morning, when the sun rose on his imaginary treasure, borne home with so much toil, behold! there was only a bundle of sticks, and invisible beings filled the air around him with scornful laughter.
Covetousness
Oh do not so marry yourselves to money that you are resolved nothing shall part you but death; be not like the medlar, which is never good till it be rotten. A covetous man may be compared to a Christmas-box--he receives money, but parts with none till death breaks this box in pieces; then the silver and gold comes tumbling out. (T. Watson.)
