Mark 6:26 And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. In illustrating how Herod was haunted by the ghost of his sin — recall some points from former lessons, as, for instance, the witness of Abel's blood from the ground against Cain; and the self-reproaches of Joseph's brethren, when the memory of their sin came upon them in after years. Reference should be made to the poem of Eugene Aram; to the night scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth tries to cleanse her guilty hands; and to the story of the man who, to gain an inheritance, flung his brother into the sea, and, ever after, when he looked upon water, saw his brother's dead face staring up from the depths. There is one stone in the floor of an old church in Scotland which stares out at you blood red from the gray stones around it. The legend tells of a murder committed there, and of repeated fruitless attempts to cover the tell-tale colour of that stone. Morally, the legend is true; every dead sin sends its ghost to haunt the soul of the guilty. Parallel Verses KJV: And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. |
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