Bible Commentaries
Ezekiel 44

Verses 1-31

Ezekiel 44:6

Still I delayed to scorn and leave the bliss of earthly things.... Wretched, most wretched, I had begged chastity from Thee in my early youth, crying, 'Give me chastity, only not yet'. For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and cure me soon of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied rather than extinguished.

Augustine, Confessions, viii. 7.

Ezekiel 44:13-14

The comparison thought, that profit accrues to a life by the wise memory of its past shortcomings, is brought out in Sir Henry Taylor's Notes on Life (p. 112): 'When the consequences of an error are irremediable, how often are those who would animadvert upon it met with the admonition to "let the past be past": as if the past had no relations with the future; and as if the experience of our errors of judgment, and the inquisition into their sources, did not, by its very painfulness, effect the deepest cultivation of the understanding that cultivation whereby what is irremediable is itself converted into a remedy.'