"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 the pack, except by an arbitrary rule--and in all the better games at cards, the joker is thrown out. When all is said and done, life is serious business. The humour, the amusement, the recreation are only the sauce on the table to give an added zest and relish--they are not the roast beef and potatoes. You cannot live on them nor by them. The man who laughs and laughs loudly and laughs at everything will have the laugh turned on him. The very fact that he has never brought his life under the power of a serious, definite, compelling purpose will cause him to be left far in the rear by those men who waken up early to the fact that the world is not to be taken as a joke. There was a certain joy no doubt in carrying off the gates of Gaza. I can recall certain episodes on the evening of the thirty-first of October when the carrying off of the gates of some neighbour seemed to me to fill the cup of life to the brim. There is a certain joy in getting a cow up into the pulpit of the College Chapel or into the belfry of some church on a dark night--the young fellow who has never helped to solve that problem in physics has missed something. There is a time to read the paper we call "Life," and to see some man on the stage who can be as funny as William Collier. Where all these are the diversions of a mind devoted to serious ends, where they are only the by-product of human interest, they have a rightful place in our regime.