" Samson is to be consecrated to God by the most
solemn of vows all the days of his life, and the conditions of that vow
his mother is commanded to fulfill from the moment that she is
conscious of his existence until he is weaned, a period of four years at
least, according to the custom of her time.
These thoughts introduce to us a theme on which volumes have been
written and spoken. Men of deep research and profound judgment have been
ready to say to all the parents of earth, "Whatever ye are such will
also your children prove always, and in every particular to be;" and
there are not wanting multitudes of facts to strengthen and confirm the
position. In certain aspects of it it is assuredly true, since the
principal characteristics of the race remain from age to age the same.
Nor is it disproved by what seem at first adverse facts, for although
children seem in physical and intellectual constitution often the direct
opposite of their parents, yet a close study into the history of
families may only prove, that if unlike those parents in general
character, they have nevertheless inherited that particular phase which
governed the period from which they date their existence. No person
bears through life precisely the same dispositions, or is at all times
equally under the same influences or governed by the same motives. The
gentle and amiable by nature may come into circumstances which shall
induce unwonted irritability and ill-humor; the irascible and
passionate, surrounded in some favored time, by all that heart can wish,
may seem as lovely as though no evil tempers had ever deformed them; and
the children who may be the offspring of these episodes in life, may
bear indeed a character differing wholly from the usual character of
their parents, but altogether corresponding to the brief and unusual
state which ruled their hour of beginning life.
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