It is turned as clay under the seal; and they stand out as a garment.
Read Chapter 38
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Seal. Men, formed to the image of God, shall die; and others shall be place in their stead, (Menochius) with as much ease as an impression is made upon clay. (Haydock)
Garment. The body seems to be the clothing of the soul, and will be changed, Psalm ci. 27. (Menochius)
Chaldean, "their form will be changed to clay, and they shall resemble a tattered garment. "Hebrew, "their seal shall change like clay "All their glory shall perish. (Calmet)
Septuagint, "hast thou taken earth or clay, and formed a living creature, and endued it with speech on the earth? "Is man the workd of thy hands? (Haydock)
21. For the Lord made man, whom He fashioned after His own likeness, as a kind of seal of His power. But yet it shall be restored as clay; because, though he may by conversion escape eternal sufferings, yet he is condemned by the death of the flesh, in punishment of the pride he has committed. For man, who has been formed from clay, and adorned with the likeness of the Divine image, having received the gift of reason, forgets, when swelling with pride of heart, that he was formed of the basest materials. Whence it hath been ordered by the marvellous justice of the Creator, that, because he became proud in consequence of that reasonable sense which he received, he should again by death become earth, which he was unwilling humbly to regard himself. And because he lost the likeness of God by sin, but returns by death to the substance of his own clay, it is rightly said; The seal shall be restored as clay. And because, when the spirit is summoned from the body, it is stripped, as it were, ...
6. What else but ‘clay’ did the Lord find the people of Israel, whom He came unto when given up to the practices of the Gentiles, and toiling at bricks in Egypt? And whilst He led it forth by so many miracles to the land of promise, and filled it, when brought thither, with the knowledge of His wisdom, whilst He conferred on it so many secret mysteries by means of Prophecy, what else did He make it but a ‘seal’ for preserving His mystery? For Divine Prophecy itself kept secret, whatever the Truth revealed of Itself at the end. But when, after so many Divine secrets, after the many miracles which it witnessed at the coming of our Redeemer, it loved its land, in preference to the truth, (saying by the Priests, If we let Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him, and the Romans will come, and take away our place and nation;) [John 11, 48] it returned, as it were, to those bricks, which it had left in Egypt: and that which had been made the seal of God, turned back again to that which it...
