Deceived by the docility of his spirit and the obedience of his behavior, he is called within the temple itself. At length, wearied with the great exertions he had been required to make, he unsuspectedly requested of the lad that led him, “Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.” Sweating, panting, weary, the captive leans for rest against the marble columns, while, in fancied security, the people shout, joke, laugh, rending his very soul. A blind man’s eye reveals no heart-secret. Samson repents a misspent life, and, conscious that his strength was Heaven’s gift, he prays, “O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.” Then, seizing the two pillars, “he bowed himself with all his might,” and in a moment the roof fell in, precipitating those on the top into one broken, dying mass with those within, and, slaying more in his death than in his life, the victor and the vanquished slept the sleep that knows no waking.
I wept when I remembered the son of Manoah. He was a child of Providence. His was a miraculous birth. Chosen to punish idolatry, to deliver his country, and judge a nation, Samson was an army of _one_. God had purposed to accomplish through him what he had done by the mighty forces of Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, and Jephthah, and to illustrate his own divine power in subduing the enemies of his church by the arm of a single man. It was a thought worthy of a God. As in other ways of the Almighty, the secret of Samson’s power was hidden. Unlike Goliath, he was an ordinary man in stature: there was nothing in his physique that indicated his wondrous strength. It was this that confounded his foes, and impelled them to solicit Delilah with a bribe to ascertain the secret of his power. As his strength was not in his muscles, so it was not in the seven locks of his hair. When asleep and at ordinary duties he was as other men, but when the Philistines were to be punished, the Spirit of the Lord came upon him. So long as he retained the solitary virtue of secrecy, and allowed his beard and hair to grow untrimmed, it pleased the Lord to use him as he did Jephthah and Cyrus, and as he does a thunderbolt or a volcano, to punish the wicked; but when he preferred the smiles of a woman to the benedictions of heaven, he became as other men. Though a failure in life, he was faithful in death; and for the faith of his dying act, St. Paul records the name of Samson among the illustrious believers.[396]