on the need of personal purity? Of the two forms of sin which
especially assail young men, Samson might guard us from one by way of
example, and from the other by way of warning. Touching no wine, for
he was a Nazarite from his birth, he excelled in strength. But placing
his head in the lap of a false woman whose name was Delilah, there came
to him weakness, blindness, the prison house, and the grave."

He refused the cup which cheers and also inebriates, but he gave his
heart and his strength to that alluring enemy of the divine purpose who
ruined him. Where a young man is a physical weakling, then if his mind
is dull and his heart mean, he is at least all of a piece. He is
consistent in his make-up. Where his body is strong as was the body of
this young giant, revealing in every movement of it that joy and vigour
which come with abundance of life, then if his mental and moral life
are weak and thin, there is something tragic in that walking lie. The
outward man promises so much, but the inward man is a wail of
disappointment.

"The Philistines took him," is the terse comment of the writer upon
Samson's unhappy career. But his sins had already taken him captive.
He had become the bond servant of his own passions. He was already a
slave through his lack of self-control.

"The wages of sin is death"--if you doubt it read through to the end
the story of any man who is headed wrong and keeps going in that
direction. You will find the word "Death" written over against his
name in five capital letters. Read the story of this young man who in
his youth was so "strong and sunny," as his name in the original has
it. When you read on you presently find him dead in his eyes, as he
gropes his way about the prison house in the land of the Philistines.
He is dead in his muscles as he weakly turns the wheels of a mill,
which was the work commonly assigned to women in those rude tribes. He
is dead in reputation--the fool and the jester brought in to make sport
at the table of his captors! He is dead in his soul for he is unaware
that the Lord has departed from him. The wages of sin is death.
Whether pay day comes the following Saturday night or at the end of the
year, or in the final outcome, in every case the sorry result will be
the same.

We are compelled to say that Samson's life was a tragedy because he
failed at these three points. He never learned to take life seriously.
The joker is not the best card in t