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 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.