The Philistines jeered and laughed and shouted at Samson. Oh, they
wanted him to make sport for them, and he made sport for them! How
bright and gay was the scene for a little while! After awhile the
giant puts one hand against this pillar, and the other hand against
this pillar, and bows himself, and three thousand merry-makers are
mashed like grapes in a wine-press. Sin rapturous at the start, awful
at the last.
That one Edenic transgression did not seem to be much, but it struck a
blow which to this day makes the earth stagger like an ox under a
butcher's bludgeon. To find out the consequences of that one sin, you
would have to compel the world to throw open all its prison doors and
display the crime, and throw open all its hospitals and display the
disease, and throw open all the insane asylums and show the
wretchedness, and open all the sepulchres and show the dead, and open
all the doors of the lost world and show the damned. That one Edenic
transgression stretched chords of misery across the heart of the world
and struck them with dolorous wailing, and it has seated the plagues
upon the air and the shipwrecks upon the tempest, and fastened like a
leech famine to the heart of the sick and dying nations. Beautiful at
the start, horrible at the last. Oh, how many have experienced it!