Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You traverse land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
15. For you compass sea and land. The scribes had also acquired celebrity by their zeal in laboring to bring over to the Jewish religion the strangers and uncircumcised. And so, if they had gained any one by their false appearances, or by any other stratagem, they gloried wonderfully over it as an increase of the Church.
Woe unto you, you blind guides,.... Meaning the same persons, the Scribes and Pharisees, as before, though not named, who pretended to be "guides of the blind", Rom 2:19 but were them selves blind, and so very unfit to be guides of others; they were as they were born, ignorant of divine things, of God in Christ, of the true Messiah, of the true meaning...
Verse 15. Ye compass sea and land. Ye take every means--spare no pains to gain proselytes. Proselyte. One that comes over from a foreign nation, religion, or sect, to us; a convert. Among the Jews there were two kinds of proselytes: (1.) Proselytes of righteousness, or those who wholly and fully embraced the Jewish religion, were baptized, circumcised, and who conformed to all the rites of the Mosaic institutions.