A wicked man's persistence in wrong-doing.
Pharaoh when he first gave the order to withhold straw (Exodus 5:7), may not have known the amount of misery he was causing. He may have meant no more than to give the people full occupation, and so prevent such gatherings as that from which Moses and Aaron had come (Exodus 4:29-31), when they appeared before him with their demands. He may not have realised to himself the idea that he was setting his bondsmen an impossible task. But now this fact was brought home to him, and he was asked, as a matter of simple justice, either to let straw be furnished as before, or to allow some diminution in the number of the bricks. It can scarcely be doubted that he knew and felt the demand made to be just. There were the officers before him with the wheals upon their backs. Would they have incurred the severe punishment, could they by any possibility have avoided it? Pharaoh must have known that they would not. But he would not relent. As he had begun, he would continue. He had been mere cruel than he meant; but he did not care—it was only Hebrews and bondsmen who had suffered; what mattered their agonies? So he dismisses the complainants with jeers and scoffs: "Ye are idle, ye are hypocrites; go, work." So bad men almost always go on from bad to worse by a "facile descent;" severity deepens into cruelty, unkindness into injustice, religious indifference into impiety. Stop, then, the beginnings of wrong-doing. Principiis obsta. Crush the nascent germs of vice in thy heart, O man! Master them, or they will master thee!