081. The Shears of Delilah

The Shears of Delilah

Jdg_16:19 : ’93And she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and the strength went from him.’94

It would take a skilful photographer to picture Samson as he really was. The most facile words are not supple enough to describe him. He was a giant and a child; the conqueror and the victim; able to snap a lion’92s jaw and yet captured by the sigh of a maiden. He was ruler and slave; a commingling of virtues and vices, the sublime and the ridiculous; sharp enough to make a good riddle, and yet weak enough to be caught in the most superficial stratagem; honest enough to settle his debt, and yet outrageously robbing somebody else to get the material to pay it; a miracle and a scoffing; a crowning glory and a burning shame.

There he stands, looming up above other men, a mountain of flesh; his arms bunched with muscle that can lift the gate of a city; taking an attitude defiant of armed men and wild beasts. His hair had never been cut, and it rolled down in seven great plaits over his shoulders, adding to his fierceness and terror. The Philistines want to conquer him, and therefore they must find out where the secret of his strength lies. There is a woman living in the valley of Sorek by the name of Delilah. They appoint her the agent in the case. The Philistines are secreted in the same building, and then Delilah goes to work and coaxes Samson to tell what is the secret of his strength. ’93Well,’94 he says, ’93if you should take seven green withes, such as they fasten wild beasts with, and put them around me, I should be perfectly powerless.’94 So she binds him with the seven green withes. Then she claps her hands, and says, ’93They come’97the Philistines!’94 and he walks out as though there were no impediment. She coaxes him again, and says, ’93Now tell me the secret of this great strength;’94 and he replies, ’93If you should take some ropes that have never been used, and tie me with them, I should be just like other men.’94 She ties him with the ropes, claps her hands, and shouts, ’93They come’97the Philistines!’94 He walks out as easily as he did before’97not the slightest obstruction. She coaxes him again, and he says, ’93Now, if you should take these seven long plaits of hair, and by this house-loom weave them into a web, I could not get away.’94 He was getting dangerously near the truth. So the house-loom is rolled up, and the shuttle flies backward and forward, and the long plaits of hair are woven into a web. Then she claps her hands, and says, ’93They come’97the Philistines!’94 He walks out as easily as he did before, dragging a part of the loom with him. But after a while she persuades him to tell the whole truth. He says, ’93If you should take a razor, or shears, and cut off this long hair, I should be powerless in the hands of my enemies.’94 Samson sleeps, and, that she may not wake him up during the process of shearing, help is called in.

You know that the barbers of the East have such a skilful way of manipulating the head, to this very day, that, instead of waking up a sleeping man, they will put a man, wide awake, sound asleep. I hear the blades of the shears grinding against each other, and I see the long locks falling off. The shears, or razor, accomplishes what green withes and new ropes and house-loom could not do. Suddenly she claps her hands, and says, ’93The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!’94 He rouses up with a struggle, but his strength is all gone! He is in the hands of his enemies! I hear the groan of the giant as they take his eyes out, and then I see him staggering on in his blindness, feeling his way as he goes on toward Gaza. The prison-door is opened, and the giant is thrust in. He sits down and puts his hands on the mill-crank, which, with exhausting horizontal motion, goes day after day, week after week, month after month’97work, work, work! The consternation of the world in captivity, his locks shorn, his eyes punctured, grinding corn in Gaza!

Alas! for those fatal shears. They did the work, and they have kept on doing the work. They have not yet finished their mission. Those shears are busy today cutting off not only the locks of Samson, but also of Delilah.

It seems to me that it is high time that pulpit and platform and printing-press speak out against the impurities of modern society. Fastidiousness and Prudery say, ’93Better not speak; you will rouse up adverse criticism; you will make worse what you want to make better; better deal in glittering generalities; the subject is too delicate for polite ears.’94 But there comes a voice from heaven overpowering the mincing sentimentalities of the day, saying, ’93Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins.’94 So that, turning away from the advice of men, I take counsel of God, and this day arraign, expose, and denounce the impurities of modern society.

The trouble is that when people write or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive. Lord Byron in ’93Childe Harold’94 adorns this crime until it smiles like a May-queen. Michelet, the great French writer, covers it up with passionate rhetoric, until it glows like the rising sun. Before I get through, you will find that I am not making that mistake, for instead of making this crime, so prevalent in modern society, attractive, I shall make it as loathsome as a smallpox hospital.

There are today influences abroad which, if unresisted by the pulpit and the printing-press, will turn New York and Brooklyn into cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, fit only for the storm of fire and brimstone that whelmed the cities of the plain. You who are seated in your Christian homes, compassed by moral and religious restraints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds you on the north and the south and the east and the west; but I shall this day open the door of ghastliness and horror, and compel you to see and compel you to listen until, God helping, you shall be startled and aroused, throwing out one arm for help and the other arm for battle. While I speak, there are tens of thousands of men and women going over the awful plunge of an impure life; and while I cry to God for mercy upon their souls, I call upon you to marshal in the defense of your homes, your church, and your nation.

There is a banqueting-hall that you have never heard described. You know all about the feast of Ahasuerus, where a thousand lords sat. You know all about Belshazzar’92s carousal, where the blood of the murdered king spirted into the faces of the banqueters. You may know of the scene of riot and wassail when there was set before ‘c6sopus one dish of food that cost four hundred thousand dollars. But I speak today of a different banqueting-hall. Its roof is fretted with fire. Its floor is tessellated with fire. Its chalices are chased with fire. Its song is a song of fire. Its walls are buttresses of fire. It is the banqueting-hall of a libertine’92s and adulteress’92s perdition. Solomon refers to it when he says, ’93Her guests are in the depths of hell.’94

I shall explain to you how so often the shears of destruction come upon the locks of Samson and Delilah. Beginning on the lower round, I have to tell you that pauperism is the cause of a great deal of the prevalent uncleanness. There are many people in our midst who have to choose between the almshouse and crime. There are women who can get neither sewing nor any other kind of work. What are they to do? What shall become of them? Thousands and tens of thousands of them have been fighting the battle for bread five, ten, fifteen years. They sold the piano, they sold the pictures, they sold the library, they sold the carpet, they sold the chairs, they sold the bed, they sold the wardrobe; there is one thing more to sell, and that is their immortal nature. At that crisis infamous solicitation meets them, and they go down. With one awful fling they throw away their needle and their soul.

Besides this, there are in this cluster of cities’97and when I say in this sermon this cluster of cities, I mean New York, Jersey City, and Brooklyn’97there are in this cluster of cities six hundred thousand people who are jammed together in tenement-houses, with no opportunity for seclusion or decency, and do you wonder that so many of them forget the covenant of their God? Forty and fifty families sometimes, literally forty and fifty families, crowded together under one roof. One hundred and seventy thousand families living in twenty-seven thousand houses’97this tenement-house outrage more terrible than anything to be found in all Christendom, putting out of sight almost the London stories of St. Giles and Whitechapel. These tenement-houses are the hopper for the mill that is grinding up the bodies and the souls of men, women, and little children.

Some time ago a girl of fourteen years came into one of the reform schools in New York. The teacher of the school said, ’93Poor girl, did you forget your mother, and that it was a sin?’94 She looked up and said, ’93No, I didn’92t forget my mother. My mother has no clothes, and I have no shoes, and this dress is almost worn out, and the winter’92s coming on. I know what it is to make money, sir. Why, I have taken care of myself since I was ten years of age. You think it was a sin, do you?’94 And the tears rolled down her face, and she did not try to wipe them away. ’93It was a sin, but I do not ask you to forgive me. Men can’92t forgive, but God can. I know, sir, what men are. The rich do wickedness, but nothing is said about them. But I am poor, and God knows that many a time I have gone hungry all day because I didn’92t dare to spend a penny or two’97all I had left. Oh, sir, I sometimes wish that I could die. I wonder why God don’92t kill me.’94 Alas! for the poor things. Do you wonder that they go down? Moral: do all you can for the poor. Keep them from being crowded off into sin. Do not get the idea often uttered in derision that anybody is weak who yields to such temptations. There are sitting before me today five hundred people in furs and diamonds who, under the same pressure, would have gone overboard! If, man or woman, you have not done as badly as they, it is because you have not been as much tempted. If Delilah has not shorn your locks, it is because she has not had the same chance at you.

Again I remark, that the corrupt literature of this day is the cause of much uncleanness. I referred to this in a former sermon, but I reserved to this day some facts which will appall you. You know that there are hundreds of thousands of sheets in the shape of impure novelette literature going abroad, every plot of those novelettes turning on libertinism and full of salacious suggestion. Much of the printing-press of the country reeks with pollution. The child that comes to fifteen or sixteen years of age now in these cities has read more bad books and seen more bad pictures than your grandmother and grandfather read or saw up to the time they put on spectacles. There was one citizen in Brooklyn who made four hundred thousand dollars by publishing corrupt books, and when he was seized by governmental authority there was found thirty thousand dollars’92 worth of stock on hand. That man is dead, but his wife has his money, and now moves, I am told, in respectable circles. It must be told that of the four men who originally published all the impure books and newspapers in this country, three of them lived in Brooklyn. Two of them are dead, thank God! I wish they all were.

In the city of New York there was one house under the control of a man who was a member of the church, and that house did nothing but make bad books, circulars, and pictures. When the authorities seized upon the place, they found whole tons of stereotyped plates for doing nothing but the printing of bad circulars and books. That man was a member of a church. He was awfully pious! He had on the mantel in his factory a rack containing religious tracts, with the inscription on the outside, ’93Take one.’94 I do not know whether to this day he has been excommunicated, for other churches have not the moral courage which the Session of this church had when, last spring, finding a bad man in our membership, they unanimously ejected him, all the sixteen men of the Session having the moral daring to vote ’93Aye.’94 God speed the day when it shall be impossible for a man to practice iniquity and yet keep his place in the membership of a Christian church!

But to go back to my theme. There was one man in our neighboring city who published and sold to one dealer one hundred and twenty-five thousand unclean books. When the authorities came upon him there were found forty thousand copies yet unsold. Binding these bad books in one of the factories were forty young women. One hundred and ninety thousand impure photographs and engravings have been arrested in their flight of death. Twenty tons of iniquitous literature have been thrown into the flames. But the tide of evil goes on. How many are engaged in it? Some with the title of M. D. at the end of their names, implying that they are public benefactors and friends of humanity.

These people despoil the souls of men and women, if not in one way, then in another. They send their circulars and handbills far away. They put their infamous pictures on the back of playing-cards. They cut them into watch-cases. The vendors in this business have the names of all the boarding-schools in the country, male and female; and not only the names of all the schools, but the names of all the students. The catalogues have been found in possession of these vultures, and their circulars and their pictures and their books go through the post-office department to all the young. The base circulars and advertisements are thrown into your doorway. They are flinging across this land the plagues of Egypt, the frogs and the boils and the murrain and the lice, turning the rivers into blood and the heavens into darkness. You, the father and mother, do not know it; but your children come to fifteen or sixteen years of age have seen the pictures and have read the books. There is not a school, not a shop, not a factory, not a home but has been assaulted in some way by this literature. So far from exaggerating the evil, if you could today understand the magnitude of it, it seems to me you would rise up from your seats and shriek out with horror. These villains’97be they authors, engravers, publishers, or vendors’97ought to be seized of the law, summarily tried, sentenced to the full extent of the statute, and on swiftest express train hurried up to Sing Sing Penitentiary; and no man found in gubernatorial or Presidential chair should ever dare to pardon one of them. This evil does not need the snail-pace of the law; it wants the quick spring of human and divine indignation.

Again: Infidelity and skepticism are the two blades of a shears which clip off much of the purity of the land. I do not mean to say that all skeptics are themselves unclean, but I do say that they open one of the widest doors to this iniquity. Purity and the sanctity of the marriage relation have only one foundation, and that is this book which King James got fifty-four ministers to translate, and which Robert Barker first printed in English. You throw away your Bible, and you throw away the mightiest bulwark of chastity and the marriage relation. A man that fights against that book fights in behalf of licentiousness. Infidelity is the mother of Fourierism, Communism, Mormonism, Socialism, Freeloveism, and much of what is falsely called ’93Woman’92s Rights.’94 I abhor the whole herd of them. There are many rights that belong to women which I hope in some day will be accorded to her; but I tell you, my Christian brethren, this whole subject of ’93Woman’92s Rights’94 in our day is so mixed up with infidelity and lust that you had better, if you are decent people, come off that platform, and let the maniacs have it all to themselves. We propose to build a Christian platform, on which we shall discuss the rights of both sexes, as God in his word lays down those rights. I charge upon Freeloveism that it has blighted innumerable homes, and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin. Freeloveism is bestial; it is worse’97it is infernal. It has furnished this land with about five hundred divorces annually. In one county in the State of Indiana it furnished eleven divorces in one day before dinner. It has roused up elopements North, South, East, and West. You can hardly take up a paper but you read of an elopement.

As far as I can understand the doctrine of Freeloveism, it is this: that every man ought to have somebody else’92s wife, and every wife somebody else’92s husband! They do not like our Christian organization of society, and I wish they would all elope, the wretches of one sex taking the wretches of the other, and start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara Desert, until the simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand over all of them, and not one passing caravan for the next five hundred years bring back one miserable bone of their carcasses. Freeloveism! It is the double-distilled extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder’92s-tongue. Freeloveism has raised in this city of Brooklyn a stench that has gone all over the world, and I think they will have to shut up the windows and gates of heaven to keep out the insufferable malodor. Never, until society goes back to the old Bible, and hears its eulogy of purity and its anathema of uncleanness, never until then will the fatal shears be unriveted.

Again: The evil solicitation of the street shears off much of the moral strength. The uncleanness under the gas-light of the street-lamp may disgust you, but it is an appalling fact that night by night there are thousands going down under the process. Solomon a good many years ago gave a picture of Broadway and the Bowery after nine o’92clock at night: ’93She sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city, to call passengers who go right on their ways: whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; and as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there.’94

Forty-five hundred of those lost souls trudging the streets in this cluster of cities night by night on their errand of death! Hovering around hotels and depots! Flaunting their insignia of iniquity! Laughing the fiend’92s laugh! Rolling up and down in surges of death! Forty-five hundred taking down their victims! New York pre-eminent above all the cities in this land for this infamy! One of the superintendents of police declared there were enough houses of iniquity in New York to make a line three miles long, and that they would crowd Broadway from the Battery to Houston street, in solid blocks, on each side; some of them having all the repulsions of Water street and of the sailors’92 boarding-house, but some having all the glitter of the Fifth avenue parlor. Upholstery outflaming the setting sun; mirrors winged with cherubim; fountains trickling mid-room into aquariums afloat with bright fins; pictures that rival the Louvre and Luxembourg; carpets embracing the feet with their luxuriance; Chickering grand pouring out upon the night air snatches of opera to charm passers-by. But the dead are there; and if the enchanter’92s wand could only be turned backward, or inverted, the upholstery would turn into a shroud, and the bright fountain into waters ropy and scummed, and the chandelier into the fretted roof of a sepulchre, and the song into a dirge, and the gay denizens of the place into the wan faces of the damned.

These places are all the time being filled up by the tides that are coming in from the villages and the cities around us’97aye, from the beautiful houses of this city, pouring in and falling down into an aggregation of misery and suffering inexpressible. Nine-tenths of the inmates are the victims of man’92s profligacy, and are now taking their vengeance on society; reaching up from the depths of their souls’92 suicide, clutching for immortal souls, dragging them down to their abysm; and every time they clutch with skeleton fingers, hearts are breaking, and homes are falling, and desolations are accumulating. Do you know there are men who do nothing else but try to draw souls into this whirlpool?

The first time I ever saw the city’97it was the city of Philadelphia’97I was a mere lad. I stopped at a hotel, and I remember in the even-tide one of these men plied me with his infernal art. He saw I was green. He wanted to show me the sights of the town. He painted the path of sin until it looked like emerald; but I was afraid of him. I shrank back from the basilisk’97I made up my mind he was a basilisk. I remember how he wheeled his chair round in front of me, and, with a concentred and diabolical effort, attempted to destroy my soul; but there were good angels in the air that night. It was no good resolution on my part, but it was the all-encompassing grace of a good God that delivered me. Beware! beware! oh, young man. ’93There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death.’94

If all the victims of this temptation, in all lands and ages, could be gathered together, they would make a host vaster than that which Xerxes led across the Hellespont, than that which Napoleon marshaled at Austerlitz, than that which Wellington led into Waterloo; and if they could be stretched out in single file across this continent, I think the vanguard of the host would stand on the beach of the Pacific, while yet the rear-guard stood on the beach of the Atlantic.

But I must close the black lids of this fearful subject. It seems as if for the last hour I had been walking through the leprous lazaretto, groans on every side, and the air heavy with moral contagion. I am preaching this sermon, not because I expect to reclaim any one that has gone astray in this fearful path, but because I want to utter a warning for those who still maintain their integrity. The cases of reclamation are so few, probably you do not know one of them. I have seen a good many start out on that road. How many have I seen come back? Not one that I now think of. It seems as if the spell of death is on them, and no human voice nor the voice of God can break the spell. Their feet are hoppled. Their wrists are handcuffed. They have around them a girdle of reptiles, bunched at the waist, fastening them to an iron doom; and every time they breathe, the forked tongues strike them, and the victims strain to break away, until the tendons snap, and the blood exudes; and in the contortions of the eternally destroyed they cry out, ’93Take me back to my father’92s house! Where is mother? Take me home! Take me home!’94

But no, I do not believe there is one out of five thousand that ever comes back. It seems as if the infatuation is fatal. One went forth from a bright Christian home. There was no reason why she should forsake it; but induced by unclean novelette literature she started off, and sat down at the banquet of devils. Every few weeks she would come back to her father’92s house, and hang up her hat and shawl in the old place, as though she expected to stay; but in a few hours, as if hounded by an inexorable fate, she would take down her hat and the shawl and start out. When they called her back she slammed the door in their faces, and cried, ’93O mother! it’92s too late!’94

Do I stand before a man today the locks of whose strength are being toyed with? Let me beg you to escape, lest the shears of destruction take your moral and spiritual integrity. Do you not see your sandals beginning to curl on that red-hot path? This day, in the name of Almighty God, I tear off the beautifying veil and the embroidered mantle of this old hag of iniquity, and I show you the ulcers, and the bloody ichor, and the cancered lip, and the eaten-up nostril, and the parting joints, and the macerated limbs, and the wriggling putrefaction, and I cry out, ’93Oh, horror of horrors!’94

May the lightnings of an incensed God strike every house of shame, and consume all the tons of impure literature, and write on the heavens, in capitals of fire a mile high, ’93All whoremongers and adulterers and sorcerers shall Have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimestone, which is the second death.’94

May God forbid that any of you who have been invited into the ways of pleasantness and the paths of peace should turn your back on your safety and happiness, and go to sit down in a dungeon, where the eternally destroyed forever grind in the mills of despair, their locks shorn, and their eyes out. Samson ungianted.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage