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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 251. The Profanation of Strength
Subjects in this Topic:
II
The Profanation of Strength
Literature
Clifford, J., The Gospel of Gladness (1912), 54.
Forbes, J. T., God's Measure (1898), 107.
Horan, F. S., A Call to Seamen (1907), 106.
Horne, C. S., The Soul's Awakening (1902), 267.
Lang, J. M., Gideon and the Judges (1890), 76.
MacArthur, R. S., Quick Truths in Quaint Texts, ii. (1907) 50.
Maclaren, A., Expositions: Deuteronomy, etc. (1906), 250.
Townsend, W. J., in Men of the Old Testament: Cain to David (1904), 213.
Whitham, A. R., Old Testament History (1912), 187.
Wright, W. B., The World to Come (1896), 112.
Church of England Pulpit, lix. (1905) 38 (F. R. M. Hitchcock).
Expositor, 4th Ser., iv. (1891) 360 (W. G. Elmslie).
Samson had come to middle life, not a faultless Adonis by any means, but a man who in the main had loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and who certainly had held no truce with the principalities and powers of evil as he saw and knew them. Then he judged Israel for twenty years; and nothing is told of these middle years, perhaps because there was nothing to tell. It is not that the years were quiet and uneventful. It is not a case of the proverb “Happy is the country that has no history.” It is that somehow or other he fell a victim to the fatal temptations of middle life; that he went into it with a soul and came out of it with little or none.
A man frequently goes on imagining that the religious teaching with which he has been imbued in childhood is in full force in him, whereas there is not even a trace left of it.
S--, an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he came to stop believing. When he was twenty-six years old he once at a night's rest during the chase followed his old habit, acquired in his childhood, and stood up to pray. His elder brother, who took part in the chase, was lying on the hay and looking at him. When S-- got through and was about to lie down, he said to him: “So you are still doing these things?”
That was all that was said. And S-- that very day quit praying and attending church. Thirty years have passed since he stopped praying, receiving the communion, and going to church. Not that he knew the convictions of his brother and had joined them, not that he had decided on anything in his mind, but only because the sentence which his brother had uttered was like the pressure exerted with a finger against a wall which was ready to fall of its own weight; the sentence was merely an indication that where he thought there was faith there had long been a vacant spot, and that, therefore, the words which he spoke and the signs of the cross and the obeisances which he made during his praying were quite meaningless actions. Since he had come to recognize their meaninglessness, he could not keep them up any longer.
Thus it has always been with an enormous majority of people. They are in that condition when the light of knowledge and of life has melted the artificial structure, and they have either noticed it and have cleared the place, or have not yet noticed it.1 [Note: Tolstoy, My Confession (Works, xiii. 5).]
The Philistine women continued to attract Samson. At Gaza this led to his being discovered by his enemies, and the town-gates were shut upon him. But Samson rose in the middle of the night, and, in that jesting humour of his, took hold of the brazen gates of the city, lifted them clean out, with the posts in which they were placed, carried them to the top of a neighbouring hill, and left them there. This, of course, added to the resentment of the Philistines against him, and helped to bring about the crisis in which he perished.