12. Asses seem to figure quite conspicuously in Bible history. Sometimes they talk and reason like a Cicero, as in the case of Balaam; and they serve other important ends in the histories of Abram and Job (who had a thousand) and Samson, and also that of Jesus Christ, who is represented as riding two at once. In the hands of Samson the jaw-bone of an ass was more destructive than a twenty-four pound cannon, besides furnishing him with water sufficient to supply his thirst.
13. Another feat of this young Hercules was that of carrying away the gate and gate-posts of the city of Gaza, in which the keepers had shut him up while lodging with a harlot. Most of his female companions seem to have been licentious characters; and yet "the Lord favored him"!
14. It is said "the spirit of the Lord moved Samson" (Judg. xiii. 25). It would seem that the spirit of the Devil did also; for he had a terrible propensity for lying. He lied even to his own wife three or four times. He once deceived her by telling her that his strength could be overcome by tying him with green withes; and yet he snapped them like cobwebs. He then virtually confessed to her that he had lied, but told her that new ropes would accomplish the thing; and yet he was no sooner bound with them, than he freed his limbs as easily as a lion would crawl out of a fish-net. The next experiment in lying and tying appertained to his hair. He told his sweet Delilah, that, if she would weave his seven locks of hair into the web in the loom, he would be as weak as another man; but he walked off with the web and the whole accouterments hanging to his head, as easily as a wolf would with a steel trap dangling to his foot. Why did not the hair pull out by the roots? he then told her the truth, as was assumed, but which was evidently the biggest falsehood he had uttered,—that his strength lay in his hair, and that his strength would depart if his hair were to be shorn off. But if there were any physical strength incorporated in the hair, so that it would flow into the brain and down into the muscles when wanted to be used, men would not frequent barber-shops, as they now do, but let it grow ten feet long if necessary.
15. The last great act in this drama of physical prowess was that of overthrowing a house with three thousand people on the roof. (Modern architecture don't often produce a roof large enough or strong enough to sustain three thousand people. This feat would require more strength than to conquer the battalion armed with chariots of iron!)
16. And in all this unholy and wicked business of lying, cheating, and murdering, "the Lord was with him." This is a slanderous imputation upon Divine Perfection and Holiness.
17. No good that we can discover, but much evil, was accomplished by the practical life of this extraordinary man. He was ostensibly raised up to redeem Israel; and yet, immediately after his death, the Philistines gained a complete victory over the Israelites, and took prisoner the ark of the Lord, and reduced them to a worse condition than they were in before.
18. We can not escape the conviction that such stories have a demoralizing effect upon those who read them, and believe they have the divine approval.
19. For seeming to treat the subject in a spirit of ridicule, I will cite a Christian writer as authority, who says, "He who treats absurdities with seriousness lowers his own dignity and manhood."
20. Such stories as the foregoing can certainly do nothing toward improving the morals of the heathen by placing the book containing it in their hands.