Darkness, as thus set in contrast with uprightness, may be interpreted as descriptive both of the _nature_ of the ways, and of their _tendency_ and _end_. The man who walks in uprightness walks in light. His eye is "single." There is "none occasion of stumbling in him." He has but _one_ principle; his "eyes look right on, his eyelids look straight before him." He is not always looking this way and that, for devious paths that may suit a present purpose, but presses on ever in the same course; and this all is light, all plain, all safe. "The ways of darkness" are the ways of concealment, evasion, cunning, tortuous policy and deceit. He who walks in them is ever groping; hiding himself among the subtleties of "fleshly wisdom": and being ways of false principle and sin, they are ways of danger, and shame, and ruin.--_Wardlaw._ There is a strictly casual and reciprocal relation between unrighteous deeds and moral darkness. The doing of evil produces darkness, and darkness produces the evil doing. Indulged lusts put out the eye-sight of the conscience; and under the darkened conscience the lusts revel unchecked.--_Arnot._ The light stands in the way of their wicked ways as the angel did in Balaam's way to his sin.--_Trapp._ Verse 14. Though it be wormwood which they drink (Lam. iii. 15), yet being drunk with it, they perceive not the bitterness thereof, but like drunken men rejoice in their shame and misery.--_Jermin._ Better is the sorrow of him that suffereth evil than the jollity of him that doeth evil, saith St. Augustine.--_Trapp._ Here is a note of trial to discern our spiritual estate. Wicked men rejoice in sin; good men sorrow more for sin than for troubles. . . . Many triumph in their evil deeds because they have no good to boast of. And men are naturally proud and would boast of something.--_Francis Taylor._ Verse 16. There is no viler object in nature than an adulteress. Though born and baptised in a Christian land, she is to be looked upon as a heathen woman and a stranger, and as self-made brutes are greater monsters than natural brute beasts, so baptised heathens are by far the worst of pagans.--_Lawson._ This strange woman is an emblem of impenitence. The passage 16-19, means the seductiveness and yet the betraying wretchedness of impenitence. The woman who has left her husband has also left her God; and the _nulla vestigia retrorsum_ witnessed in her dupes is the warning for the saint by which he keeps clear of her undoing. No man would err who would treat of adultery as having its lessons here. But no man would understand the passage who did not understand it further as a great picture of impenitence. The warnings are two: (1) the un-stopping-short character of sin; she who wrongs her husband will be seen universally wronging God: and (2) the unrecuperative history of the lost.--_Miller_