“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674too weak in wisdom to cope with his woman. The Danites seek answers in a
moralizing formula – “Tax not divine disposal, wisest Men / Have err’d, and by
bad Women been deceiv’d; / And shall again” (210–12) – and also in legalisms,
throwing up to Samson his marriage out of the tribe. But in doing so they prod
Samson to think his way beyond the Hebrew marriage law and Dalila’s fault, and
admit his own guilt in revealing God’s secret: “She was not the prime cause, but I
my self, / Who vanquisht with a peal of words (O weakness!) / Gave up my fort of
silence to a Woman” (234–6). The Danites then imply that Samson’s supposed
political mission is discredited by the sad result, that “Israel still serves with all his
Sons” (240). They never refer to his wonderful past deeds as God-given signs of his
calling, and they resist his claim that his first marriage was prompted by an intimate
impulse from God as an occasion to begin Israel’s deliverance, and his second by a
reasonable analogy to that case. Their challenge goads Samson to reclaim his past.
Insisting that his extraordinary deeds were an unmistakable sign of his vocation as
liberator, he disclaims responsibility for Israel’s continued servitude: that is due to
the blindness and political cowardice of her governers, “Who seeing those great
acts which God had done / Singly by me against their Conquerours / Acknowledg’d
not” (243–5) and betrayed him. That judgment also convicts the English parlia-
ment who repudiated the deliverance God offered them, and gave over the Com-
monwealth’s defenders to the vengeance of their royalist enemies. It also corrects
those dissenters who might judge simplistically by results, accepting royalist inter-
pretations of their defeat and oppression as God’s punishment for their rebellion.
The Israel–England parallel is reinforced as Samson voices the Miltonic principle
that inner servitude leads to political bondage in whatever country:
But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,
And by thir vices brought to servitude,
Then to love Bondage more then Liberty,
Bondage with ease then strenuous liberty;
And to despise, or envy, or suspect
Whom God hath of his special favour rais’d
As thir Deliverer; if he aught begin,
How frequent to desert him, and at last
To heap ingratitude on worthiest deeds? (268–76)In the ode that follows – “Just are the ways of God, / And justifiable to Men”
(294–5) – the chorus shows some advance in their understanding, as they now
acknowledge Samson’s deeds and even his inner promptings as divinely inspired
and allow that God could dispense with his own laws in regard to Samson’s gentile
marriages. But they cannot move beyond pat formulas in accounting for Samson’s
predicament, and soon revert to the un-Miltonic notion that humans cannot begin
to understand God’s justice or reason about it.^133
The second agon, between Samson and his father Manoa, centers on what a