“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674divinely appointed liberator and his party should do in defeat. In a brilliant charac-
terization, Milton portrays Manoa as an old man whose concerns center on family
and family honor. He is dismayed by Samson’s suffering, but almost more distressed
by the evil of God’s ways to him in degrading the son who had elicited such pater-
nal pride: “Who would be now a Father in my stead?” (355). He does not doubt
that Samson’s former deeds were signs of his divine mission, but he also judges by
the Judaic Law and by results, ascribing Samson’s fall to his gentile marriages:
I cannot praise thy Marriage choises, Son,
Rather approv’d them not; but thou didst plead
Divine impulsion prompting how thou might’st
Find some occasion to infest our Foes.
I state not that; this I am sure; our Foes
Found soon occasion thereby to make thee
Thir Captive, and thir triumph. (420–6)Manoa cannot resist the chiding father’s “I told you so.” Nor can he resist throwing
up to Samson his terrible responsibility for disgracing God, who at the festival for
Dagon will be “Disglorifi’d, blasphem’d, and had in scorn / By th’ Idolatrous rout
amidst thir wine” (442–3). Samson advances in self-knowledge as he refuses to
explain his fault in terms of the marriage laws, locating it rather in a slavery to
passion worse than his present physical bondage: “Unmanly, ignominious, infa-
mous, / True slavery, and that blindness worse then this, / That saw not how
degeneratly I serv’d” (417–19). He takes full responsibility for his sin and its terrible
effects: bringing dishonor to God and prompting among the Israelites “diffidence
of God, and doubt / In feeble hearts, propense anough before / To waver, or fall
off and joyn with Idols” (454–6) – dangers to which the defeated Puritans were also
susceptible. He finds some comfort in recognizing that God can defend himself
without Samson’s help, but that perception also reinforces his sense of uselessness
and deepens his dismay.
Manoa’s proposal to ransom Samson recalls similar efforts made for some of the
English regicides, among them Edmund Ludlow and Colonel John Hutchinson.
Others, like Thomas Harrison and Milton’s good friend Henry Vane, took Samson’s
line and refused to escape or allow friends to offer money in their behalf.^134 Manoa
sees Samson’s decision to remain at the mill as suicidal, observing that his refusals
sometimes sound “over-just and self-displeas’d / For self-offence, more then for
God offended,” and insisting, plausibly enough, that God is better pleased with
“Him who imploring mercy sues for life, / Then who self-rigorous chooses death
as due” (512–15). Samson’s motives for refusing ransom are mixed and not entirely
clear even to himself: he senses that he should continue at the mill to expiate his sin
and that this debasement befits his former hubris; he recoils viscerally from the
prospect of becoming a fixture by the domestic hearth and a mere idol of his past