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.

"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.

But their lines are soon spoken, and the stage must be cleared for those who have something of more moment to tell. "How much do you really care?" the world is asking. "How ready are you to think intently upon something which has no more fun in it than a page of figures or an array of unyielding facts? How far are you ready to bend all the best energies of body, brain and heart to the gaining of some worthy end? How completely have you set your heart upon that which is vital?" Your answer to these questions will in large measure tell the story of your future achievement.

This young man failed because he had not acquired the habit of persistence. His big deeds were all done in a hurry, and they were soon over. He carried off the gates of the city in ten minutes. He tore the young lion apart in an instant. He slaughtered the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass in less time than I am taking in telling it. He tied torches to the tails of the foxes and let them loose in the wheat fields in a careless half hour of thoughtless sport. You do not find the man binding up a lifetime of effort into a moral unit by an all-inclusive and dominant intention. He was never ready to work and to keep on working until achievement of a worthy sort should crown his effort.

You cannot drive a long nail in to the head by hammering around all over the board. You must hit the nail on the head and keep on hitting it on the head until you have sent it home. You cannot sink the shaft of a mine by digging all around over the mountainside. You must dig in one place and keep on digging in one place persistently until you have sunk your shaft to the vein of ore. You cannot build a life that is worthy to be the life of a child of God unless you gird yourself for that persistent effort which lies between you and the goal upon which you have set your heart. It cannot be done in an hour, or in a day, or in a year. The hard task of presenting to Him a life which will bear His own eye and win His approval will mortgage the best strength of all your best years.

You may have the body of an athlete. You may have a mind with splendid capacity in it for real achievement. You may have a heart which reacts as promptly as gunpowder when a spark of genuine aspiration is applied to it. You may have all these—I hope you have—but unless you have learned the high art of staying by, of holding on, of keeping at it no matter what comes, you are doomed to defeat.

How often you see a young man of generous impulse, of kindly disposition, like Esau, faltering and failing as the years come and go until at last he is little better than a vagabond upon the face of the earth. How often you find a man of purpose and persistence, like Jacob, with many an unfortunate trait in him, with a heavy moral handicap to overcome, finally winning out by the sheer force of his spiritual tenacity. "Be thou faithful unto death," the promise has it, "and I will give thee the crown of life." The crown is held in reserve for those who persist clear through to the end.

This young man failed because he lacked the favour of God. In the early stages of his career we read of a divine element in his life. "The woman bare a son and called his name Samson, and the Lord blessed him. And the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him" for those deeds of valour.

However we may interpret these expressions the fact is plain that so long as he kept his life clean and true he had the