occurring here and there; and it is a great evil to fancy that their writings, in general, are not to be understood, because of the difficulty of particular passages in them.  Thus, with the very chapter of which we are now speaking, the expression to which I have alluded can only be uncertainly interpreted, yet the lesson of the chapter, as a whole, is perfectly clear, notwithstanding.  The dress, or fashions, or particular rites, of the false prophets of Jerusalem and their votaries, may offer no distinct image to our minds; but the evil of their doings, how they deceived others, and were themselves deceived; the points, that is, which alone concern us practically, these are set before us plainly.  “With their lies they made the heart of the righteous sad, whom God had not made sad; and they strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life.”  Where the way of life was broad, they strove to make it narrow; and where it was narrow, they strove to make it broad:  by their solemn and superstitious lies, they frightened and perplexed the good, while, by their lives of ungodliness, they emboldened and encouraged the wicked.

It may not, at first sight, seem necessary that these two things should go together; there might be, it seems, either the fault of making the heart of the righteous sad, without that of strengthening the hands of the wicked:  or there might be the strengthening of the hands of the wicked, without making sad the heart of the righteous.  And so it sometimes has been:  there has been a wickedness which has not tried to keep up superstition:  there has been a superstition, the supporters of which have not wilfully encouraged wickedness.  Yet, although this has been so, with respect to the intention of the parties concerned, yet in their own nature, the tendency of either evil to produce the other is sure and universal.  We cannot exist without some influences of fear and restraint, on the one hand, and without some indulgence of freedom, on the other.  God has provided for both these wants, so to speak, of our nature; he has told us whom we should fear, and where we should be restrained, and where, also, we may be safely in freedom:  there is the fruit forbidden, and the fruit which we may eat freely.  But if the restraint and the liberty be either of them put in the wrong place, the double evil is sure to follow.  Restrained in his lawful liberty, debarred from the good and wholesome fruit of the garden, man breaks out into a liberty which is unlawful; he eats of the forbidden fruit, whose taste is death; or, surfeited with an unholy freedom, and let to run wild in a space far too vast for his strength to compass, he turns cravingly for that support to his weariness which a narrowed range would afford him; and he limits himself on that very quarter in which alone he might expatiate freely.  Superstition, in fact, is the rest of wickedness, and wickedness is the breaking loose of superstition.