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must have seen in his sufferings the displeasure of that God whom he had so grievously offended. These sufferings, too, were providentially and immediately connected with his guilt. They grew out of it. They were its natural consequences. He had fallen into a shameful and sinful intimacy with a very wicked woman, and she became the willing and mercenary instrument of his enemies, in delivering him into their hands, to suffer the disgrace, the abuse, and the tortures that they inflicted upon him. Memorable instance of the necessary connection between guilt and its punishment! The wages of sin is death.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Samson in prison. He is brought to the temple of Dagon. His death. Concluding reflections.

It was a day of boastful rejoicings in Gaza when Samson was brought there. How did the Philistines exult over their vanquished enemy whom they once so much dreaded. It was not long since that, eluding their attempts to destroy

him, he had escaped from their hands, and carried off the very doors of their city-gate as the proof of his prowess, and of the vengeance which he might yet meditate against them. Now he came back a defenceless captive; shorn of his strength, blind, and in chains. His God had, for a season, abandoned him. He was left to be disposed of as they who held him in bondage might deem best.

Whatever his final doom was to be, the Philistines resolved, at least, to secure Samson, and to place him in the most degraded and humiliating condition. He was cast, still in fetters, into the common prison, and there tasked, day after day, with grinding grain with mill-stones worked by the hands, as is yet customary in the East. It was a drudgery usually performed by women, and regarded even by them as a mark of very abject submission, when done, not for their own families, but for others. It was as servile and mortifying a toil as could be imposed; and peculiarly so to one who held the station that Samson did among his countrymen, and had been, too, such a terror to the Philistines.

Here he had the best opportunity for reflecting on his past guilt; for humbling himself before God; and for resuming, with heartfelt repentance and renewed resolutions of fidelity, his broken vow of Nazariteship. We have reason to think

that he did this, and that his hair, which now began to grow again, was once more the pledge of the favor of God, and of the miraculous strength with which he would be endowed when the occasion should demand it.

Such an occasion was approaching. The lords of the Philistines had assembled, with an immense concourse of people, in the temple of their god Dagon, to offer unto him a great sacrifice, and to rejoice in his presence, because he had delivered Samson into their hands. They bowed before the idol. The smoke of their offerings ascended from his altar. They sang his praises in songs of grateful exultation. The chorus resounded on all sides: "Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy and the destroyer of our country; which slew many of us."

In the midst of their festivity, and when they had become merry with the wine they had been drinking, there was a general call for Samson to be brought before them. They wished to mortify him still more by triumphing over him in the house of their god, and by making sport of him in his captive and degraded condition. It was a cowardly and cruel purpose, alike mean and vindictive. Their prisoner came; harmless, as they thought, but conscious of his returning strength, and assured of its supernatural and sudden in crease, should he need it.

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