pages of Scripture as a big, overgrown,
rollicking boy looking upon life as one huge joke. His major study was
to turn the laugh on the dull-witted, slow-going Philistines. He tore
the young lion and when a swarm of bees had made honey in the carcass
Samson made this riddle,--"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of
the strong came forth sweetness." He propounded his riddle to the
Philistines and made them a bet that they could not guess it. And when
they wheedled the answer to the riddle out of Samson's wife he retorted
upon them in coarse fashion, "If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye
would not have guessed my riddle."

He carried off the gates of the city of Gaza and hid them. He caught
foxes and tied firebrands to their tails and then turned them loose in
the ripe wheat fields of the Philistines, roaring aloud over the havoc
they made. He slew his enemies with the jaw-bone of an ass and then
made a clever pun (which the Hebrew reveals) upon the name of his
homely weapon.

He was the joker of the pack. Time and again in the days of his power
he was able to take the trick. When he came to die that element of
grim humour was still in his heart. He had lost his strength because
he had slept for a night with his head in the lap of his enemy. His
foes had put out his eyes and had made him to grind as a slave in one
of their mills. Now he was brought as a kind of paid jester to one of
their feasts to make fun for the party.

There in the house of his foes, holding fast to a door-post he prayed
in grim fashion that his former strength might for a moment be renewed,
"that he might be avenged upon his enemies for the loss _of one of his
two eyes_." He would leave the rest of the account to be settled
later. When he had them roaring with laughter at some of his sallies,
he pulled down the house upon their heads and killed them all,
perishing himself in the disaster. He was full of humour and had a
deep sense of the joy of living.

He was a strange mixture of good and evil. Here was a blend of
weakness and of strength! Here was the baser metal mingled as an
unworthy alloy with much that was fine gold. "Samson got the laugh on
the Philistine men," as William R. Richards said once in Battell
Chapel, "but their sisters avenged themselves on him by making a slave,
a tool, and a fool of him. This old writer tells his story straight on
without stopping to moralize. But where can you find a better sermon