Isaiah admonishes the people, "Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it; so is Pharoah, king of Egypt, to all who trust in him,"--a saying which calls to mind the message Jesus sent to Herod, "Go, tell that fox." To those who trusted in the prowess of the Egyptians, Isaiah declares, "Now, the Egyptians are men and not God; and their horses are flesh and not spirit." He assures the people that the time will come when names shall be used with greater discrimination--"The vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful." Job says: "For vain man would be wise, though man be born like a wild ass's colt." And it is Job who has given us the common expression, "I am escaped with the skin of my teeth." David says of the hypocrite:--"The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, but they were drawn swords." "Man that is in honor and understandeth not, is like the beasts which perish." "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Of the wicked the psalmist exclaims: "Their poison is like the poison of a serpent; they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely." Recalling an incident of Israel's journey through the wilderness, he gives his opinion of the transaction Aaron tried to disclaim: "They made a calf in Horeb and worshipped the molten image. Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass!" "Fools, because of their transgressions and because of their iniquities are afflicted." He says of those who gave him pain,--the "ploughers who ploughed upon his back and made long their furrows,"--"They shall be as the grass upon the house-tops which withereth before it groweth up; wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom." Paul speaks of those "whose God is their belly, and whose glory is their shame;" and also of certain ones who "speak lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a red-hot iron." "Rulers," he says, "are not a terror to good works, but to evil." "If a man thinketh himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself." The Book of James has already been quoted in this chapter; but there is another passage of the proverbial or epigrammatic character that must not be omitted: "Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any man be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass; for he beholdeth himself and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." The Veman proverb is very like this: "Whatever he devoid of understanding may be reading, his virtue continues only so long as he is reading; even as a frog is dignified only so long as it is seated on a lotus leaf."