"To deliver thee from the way of the evil man.... To deliver thee from the strange woman." --PROV. ii. 12_a_-16_a_.
Wisdom is concerned, as we have seen, with the whole universe of fact, with the whole range of thought; she surveys and orders all processes of nature. We might say of her,
"She doth preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens by her are fresh and strong."
But while she is occupied in these high things, she is no less attentive to the affairs of human life, and her delight is to order human conduct, not despising even the smallest detail of that which is done by men under the sun. Side by side with physical laws, indeed often intertwined with them, appear the moral laws which issue from the lively oracles of Wisdom. There is not one authority for natural phenomena, and another for mental and moral phenomena. As we should say now, Truth is one: Science is one: Law is one. The laws of the physical order, the laws of the speculative reason, the laws of practical life, form a single system, come from the sole mind of God, and are the impartial interests of Wisdom.
As the great authority on _Conduct_, Wisdom is pictured standing in the places where men congregate, where the busy hum of human voices and the rush of hurried feet make it necessary for her to lift up her voice in order to gain attention. With words of winsome wooing--"for wisdom shall enter into thy heart, and knowledge shall be pleasant unto thy soul"[10]--or with loud threats and stern declarations of truth--"the backsliding of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them"[11]--she tries to win us, while we are yet young, to her paths of pleasantness and her ways of peace. Her object is to deliver youth, (1) from the evil man, and (2) from the evil woman, or in the most comprehensive way "to deliver us from evil."
First of all, we may spend a few moments in noting the particular temptations to which men were exposed in the days when these chapters were written.[12] There was a temptation to join a troop of banditti, and to obtain a living by acts of highway robbery which would frequently result in murder; and there was the temptation to the sin which we call specifically Impurity, a temptation which arose not so much from the existence of a special class of fallen women, as from the shocking looseness and voluptuousness of married women in well-to-do circumstances.
Society under the kings never seems to have reached anything approaching to an ordered security. We cannot point to any period when the mountain roads, even in the neighbourhood of the capital, were not haunted by thieves, who lurked in the rocks or the copses, and fell upon passing travellers, to strip and to rob, and if need be to kill them. When such things are done, when such things are even recounted in sensational literature, there are multitudes of young men who are stirred to a debased ambition; a spurious glory encircles the brow of the adventurer who sets the laws of society at defiance; and without any personal entreaty the foolish youth is disposed to leave the quiet ways of industry for the stimulating excitement and the false glamour of the bandit life. The reckless plottings of the robbers are described in chap. i. 11-14. The character of the men themselves is given in iv. 16, 17: "They sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence." The proverb in xxiv. 15 is addressed to such an one: "Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the habitation of the righteous; spoil not his resting-place."