He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.
Read Chapter 20
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Fleeth. The poets assign wings to sleep and to dreams. (Homer) Isaias (xxix. 7.) describes a man who dreams that he is eating, and finds himself hungry when he awakes. Such is the live of the avaricious, (Calmet) and of all wicked people. (Haydock)
The pride of the hypocrite is said to “mount up as high as the heavens,” when his highmindedness has the appearance of leading a heavenly life. And his “head, as it were, reaches to the clouds,” when the leading part, that is, his intellect, is thought to equal the merits of the saints that have gone before. Yet “he perishes at last like his own dung,” because at his death, when he is led to torments, being full of the dung of evil habits, he is trampled underfoot by evil spirits.… It generally happens that the life of the hypocrite is discovered by all people at the end to be damnable, for it to be made apparent by plainer marks of what sort it was. Those who formerly saw him happy shall then say of him when dead, “Where is he?” For neither is he seen here, where he was elated, nor in the rest of eternity, which he was supposed to receive. Concerning the brevity of the hypocrite’s life, it is yet further added fittingly, “He will fly away like a dream and not be found; he will be chas...
7. What else is the life of the hypocrite but the vision of a phantom, which exhibits that in semblance which it does not possess in truth? Whence too it is justly likened to ‘a dream,’ in that all praise and glory is, as it were, gone from him whilst it is being held. For oftentimes in a ‘vision of the night,’ some that are poor are full of wonder that they are made rich, they see honours awarded to them, they behold heaps of riches, a multitude of attendants, the most beautiful garments, abundance of food presented to them. They are delighted to have escaped poverty, which they bore with a grieved spirit; but on a sudden, when they wake, they find how false all the joy was which they felt, and they are sad that they have awoke, in that real want gripes them awake. Thus the minds of hypocrites, whilst what they do is one thing, and what they exhibit to men another, win applause by the mere exhibiting of holy living; in the esteem of men they are set before numbers that are better...
