To the value of this lesson the Nazarites among the Jews were a perpetual witness. Jeremiah seems to single them out for the special beauty which resulted from their youthful abstinence when he writes of Jerusalem, "Her Nazarites were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of sapphires."[262] It is the lesson which Milton reads in the story of Samson,-- "O madness! to think use of strongest wines And strongest drinks our chief support of health, When God, with these forbidden, made choice to rear His mighty champion, strong above compare, Whose drink was only from the liquid brook!" It is the lesson which Shakespeare inculcates when he makes the old man say in _As You Like It_,-- "When I was young I never did apply Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood, Nor did not with unblushful forehead woo The means of weakness and debility; Therefore mine age is as a lusty winter, Frosty, yet kindly." The writer of this Book connects intellectual advance as well as physical strength with this abstinence, and here he is supported even by ancient and pagan experience. Something of this kind may perhaps lurk in the ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ of Pindar; and certainly Horace saw that gluttony and repletion are foes to insight when he wrote,-- "Nam corpus onustum Hesternis vitiis animum quoque prægravat una, Atque affigit humo divinæ particulam auræ."[263] Pythagoras was not the only ancient philosopher who recommended and practised a vegetable diet, and even Epicurus, whom so many regard as "The soft garden's rose-encircled child," placed over his garden door the inscription that those who came would only be regaled on barley-cakes and fresh water, to satisfy, but not to allure, the appetite. But the grand lesson of the picture is meant to be that the fair Jewish boys were kept safe in the midst of every temptation to self-indulgence, because they lived as in God's sight: and "he that holds himself in reverence and due esteem for the dignity of God's image upon him, accounts himself both a fit person to do the noblest and godliest deeds, and much better worth than to deject and defile, with such debasement and pollution as Sin is, himself so highly ransomed and ennobled to a new friendship and filial relation with God."[264] FOOTNOTES: [224] Comp. Jer. xxii. 18, 19, xxxvi. 30. [225] See _supra_, p. 45. [226] Jeremiah (lii. 28-30) mentions _three_ deportations, in the seventh, eighteenth, and twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar; but there are great difficulties about the historic verification, and the paragraph (which is of doubtful genuineness) is omitted by the LXX.