Verse 17. Folly shows her skill in seduction by holding out, in promise, the secret enjoyment of forbidden sweets. Alas! since the entrance of sin into the world, there has been perverse propensity to aught that is forbidden, to taste what is laid under an interdict. The very interdiction draws towards it the wistful desires, and looks, and longings of the perverse and rebellious heart.--_Wardlaw._ The power of sin lies in its pleasure. If stolen waters were not sweet, none would steal the waters. This is part of the mystery in which our being is involved by the fall. It is one of the most fearful features of the case. Our appetite is diseased. . . . Oh, for the new tastes of a new nature! "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness." When a soul has tasted and seen that the Lord is gracious, the foolish woman beckons you toward her stolen waters, and praises their sweetness in vain. The new appetite drives out the old.--_Arnot._ Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.--_Trapp._ Indirect ways best please flesh and blood. "Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence" (Rom. vii. 8). We take this from our first parents, a greedy desire to eat of the forbidden fruit. All the other trees in the garden, although the fruit were as good, would not satisfy them. . . . Such is the corruption of our nature, that we like best what God likes worst.--_Francis Taylor._ Verse 18. Of course "he knows not." If the sinner only knew that he were already dead, he might wake up with a bound to the work of his salvation.--_Miller._ All sinful joys are dammed up with a _but._ They have a worm that crops them, nay, gnaws asunder their very root, though they shoot up more hastily and spread more spaciously than Jonah's gourd. . . . When all the prophecies of ill success have been held as Cassandra's riddles, when all the contrary minds of afflictions, all the threatened storms of God's wrath could not dishearten the sinner's voyage to these Netherlands, here is a _but_ that shipwrecks all; the very mouth of a bottomless pit, not shallower than hell itself. . . . As man hath his _sic,_ so God hath His _sed._--_T. Adams._ * * * * * * CHAPTER X. We here enter upon the second main division of the Book of Proverbs, which is composed of a number of distinct propositions or maxims, having but little connection with each other and answering to the modern signification of the word proverb. Wordsworth here remarks that "the Proverbs of the present chapter are exemplifications in detail of the principles, practices, and results of the two ways of life displayed in the foregoing chapters which constitute the prologue."