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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Abominations of Modern Society
+by Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Abominations of Modern Society
+
+Author: Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2004 [EBook #13104]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ABOMINATIONS OF MODERN SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, David Newman, Alison Hadwin and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ABOMINATIONS OF MODERN SOCIETY.
+
+BY REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE,
+
+AUTHOR OF "CRUMBS SWEPT UP"
+
+1872.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+This is a buoy swung over the rocks. If it shall keep ship, bark,
+fore-and-aft schooner, or hermaphrodite brig from driving on a lee
+shore, "all's well."
+
+The book is not more for young men than old. The Calabria was wrecked
+"the last day out."
+
+Nor is the book more for men than women. The best being that God ever
+made is a good woman, and the worst that the devil ever made is a bad
+one. If anything herein shall be a warning either to man or woman, I
+will be glad that the manuscript was caught up between the sharp teeth
+of the type.
+
+T.D.W.T.
+
+BROOKLYN, January 1st, 1872.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+The Curtain Lifted
+
+Winter Nights
+
+The Power of Clothes
+
+After Midnight
+
+The Indiscriminate Dance
+
+The Massacre by Needle and Sewing-Machine
+
+Pictures in the Stock Gallery
+
+Leprous Newspapers
+
+The Fatal Ten-Strike
+
+Some of the Club-Houses
+
+Flask, Bottle, and Demijohn
+
+House of Blackness of Darkness
+
+The Gun that Kicks over the Man who Shoots it off
+
+Lies: White and Black
+
+The Good Time Coming
+
+
+
+
+THE ABOMINATIONS.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE CURTAIN LIFTED.
+
+
+Pride of city is natural to men, in all times, if they live or have
+lived in a metropolis noted for dignity or prowess. Caesar boasted of
+his native Rome; Lycurgus of Sparta; Virgil of Andes; Demosthenes of
+Athens; Archimedes of Syracuse; and Paul of Tarsus. I should suspect
+a man of base-heartedness who carried about with him no feeling of
+complacency in regard to the place of his residence; who gloried not
+in its arts, or arms, or behavior; who looked with no exultation upon
+its evidences of prosperity, its artistic embellishments, and its
+scientific attainments.
+
+I have noticed that men never like a place where they have not behaved
+well. Swarthout did not like New York; nor Dr. Webster, Boston. Men
+who have free rides in prison-vans never like the city that furnishes
+the vehicle.
+
+When I see in history Argos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and
+several other cities claiming Homer, I conclude that Homer behaved
+well.
+
+Let us not war against this pride of city, nor expect to build up
+ourselves by pulling others down. Let Boston have its _Common_,
+its _Faneuil Hall_, its _Coliseum_, and its _Atlantic Monthly_. Let
+Philadelphia talk about its _Mint_, and _Independence Hall_, and
+_Girard College_. When I find a man living in either of those places,
+who has nothing to say in favor of them, I feel like asking him, "What
+mean thing did you do, that you do not like your native city?"
+
+New York is a goodly city. It is one city on both sides of the river.
+The East River is only the main artery of its great throbbing life.
+After a while four or five bridges will span the water, and we shall
+be still more emphatically one than now. When, therefore, I say "New
+York city," I mean more than a million of people, including everything
+between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Gowanus. That which tends to elevate
+a part, elevates all. That which blasts part, blasts all. Sin is a
+giant; and he comes to the Hudson or Connecticut River, and passes it,
+as easily as we step across a figure in the carpet. The blessing of
+God is an angel; and when it stretches out its two wings, one of them
+hovers over that, and the other over this.
+
+In infancy, the great metropolis was laid down by the banks of the
+Hudson. Its infancy was as feeble as that of Moses, sleeping in the
+bulrushes by the Nile; and like Miriam, there our fathers stood and
+watched it. The royal spirit of American commerce came down to the
+water to bathe; and there she found it. She took it in her arms,
+and the child grew and waxed strong; and the ships of foreign lands
+brought gold and spices to its feet; and, stretching itself up into
+the proportions of a metropolis, it has looked up to the mountains,
+and off upon the sea,--one of the mightiest of the energies of
+American civilization.
+
+The character of the founder of a city will be seen for many years in
+its inhabitants. Romulus impressed his life upon Rome. The Pilgrims
+relax not their hold upon the cities of New England. William Penn has
+left Philadelphia an inheritance of integrity and fair dealing; and
+on any day in that city you may see in the manners, customs, and
+principles of its people, his tastes, his coat, his hat, his wife's
+bonnet, and his plain meeting-house. The Hollanders still wield an
+influence over New York.
+
+Grand Old New York! What southern thoroughfare was ever smitten by
+pestilence, when our physicians did not throw themselves upon the
+sacrifice! What distant land has cried out in the agony of famine, and
+our ships have not put out with bread-stuffs! What street of Damascus,
+or Beyrout, or Madras that has not heard the step of our missionaries!
+What struggle for national life, in which our citizens have not poured
+their blood into the trenches! What gallery of exquisite art, in
+which our painters have not hung their pictures! What department of
+literature or science to which our scholars have not contributed!
+I need not speak of our public schools, where the children of the
+cordwainer, and milkman, and glass-blower stand by the side of the
+flattered sons of millionnaires and merchant princes; or of the
+insane asylums on all these islands, where they who came out cutting
+themselves, among the tombs, now sit, clothed and in their right mind;
+or of the Magdalen asylums, where the lost one of the street comes to
+bathe the Saviour's feet with her tears, and wipe them with the hairs
+of her head,--confiding in the pardon of Him who said--"Let him who
+is without sin cast the first stone at her." I need not speak of the
+institutions for the blind, the lame, the deaf and the dumb, for the
+incurables, for the widow, the orphan, and the outcast; or of the
+thousand-armed machinery that sends streaming down from the reservoir
+the clear, bright, sparkling, God-given water that rushes through
+our aqueducts, and dashes out of the hydrants, and tosses up in
+our fountains, and hisses in our steam-engines, and showers out the
+conflagration, and sprinkles from the baptismal font of our churches;
+and with silver note, and golden sparkle, and crystalline chime, says
+to hundreds of thousands of our population, in the authentic words of
+Him who made it--"I WILL: BE THOU CLEAN!"
+
+They who live in any of the American cities have a goodly heritage;
+and it is in no depreciation of our advantages that I speak, but
+because, in the very contrast with our opportunities and mission, THE
+ABOMINATIONS are tenfold more abominable.
+
+The sources from which I will bring the array of facts will be police,
+detective, and alms-house reports; city missionaries' explorations,
+and the testimony of the abandoned and sin-blasted, who, about to take
+the final plunge, have staggered back just for a moment, to utter the
+wild shriek of their warning, and the agonizing wail of their despair.
+
+I shall call upon you to consider the drunkenness, the stock-gambling,
+the rampant dishonesties, the club-houses so far as they are
+nefarious, the excess of fashion, the horrors of unchastity, the
+bad books and unclean newspapers, and the whole range of sinful
+amusements; and with the plough-share of truth turn up the whole
+field.
+
+If we could call up the victims themselves, they would give the most
+impressive story. People knew not how Turner, the painter, got such
+vivid conceptions of a storm at sea, until they heard the story that
+oftentimes he had been lashed to the deck in the midst of the tempest,
+in order that he might study the wrath of the sea.
+
+Those who have themselves been tossed on the wave of infamous
+transgressions could give us the most vivid picture of what it is
+to sin and to die. With hand tremulous with exhausting disease, and
+hardly able to get the accursed bowl to his lips--put into such a hand
+the pencil, and it can sketch, as can no one else, the darkness, the
+fire, the wild terror, the headlong pitch, and the hell of those who
+have surrendered themselves to iniquity. While we dare only come near
+the edge, and, balancing ourselves a while, look off, and our head
+swims, and our breath catches,--those can tell the story best who have
+fallen to the depths with wilder dash than glacier from the top of a
+Swiss cliff, and stand, in their agony, looking up for a relief
+that comes not, and straining their eyes for a hope that never
+dawns--crying, "O God!" "O God!"
+
+It is terrible to see a lion dashing for escape against the sides of
+his cage; but a more awful thing it is to behold a man, caged in bad
+habit, trying to break out,--blood on the soul, blood on the cage.
+
+Others may throw garlands upon Sin, picturing the overhanging fruits
+which drop in her pathway, and make every step graceful as the dance;
+but we cannot be honest without presenting it as a giant, black with
+the soot of the forges where eternal chains are made, and feet rotting
+with disease, and breath foul with plagues, and eyes glaring with woe,
+and locks flowing in serpent fangs, and voice from which shall rumble
+forth the blasphemies of the damned.
+
+I open to you a door, through which you see--what? Pictures and
+fountains, and mirrors and flowers? No: it is a lazar-house of
+disease. The walls drip, drip, drip with the damps of sepulchres. The
+victims, strewn over the floor, writhe and twist among each other in
+contortions indescribable, holding up their ulcerous wounds,
+tearing their matted hair, weeping tears of blood: some hooting with
+revengeful cry; some howling with a maniac's fear; some chattering
+with idiot's stare; some calling upon God; some calling upon fiends;
+wasting away; thrusting each other back; mocking each other's pains;
+tearing open each other's ulcers; dropping with the ichor of death!
+The wider I open the door, the ghastlier the scene.--Worse the
+horrors. More desperate recoils. Deeper curses. More blood. I can no
+longer endure the vision, and I shut the door, and cover my eyes, and
+turn my back, and cry, "God pity them!"
+
+Some one may say, "What is the use of such an exposure as you propose
+to make? Our families are all respectable." I answer, that no family,
+however elevated and exclusive, can be independent of the state of
+public morals.
+
+However pleasant the block of houses in which you dwell, the
+wretchedness, the temptation, and the outrage of municipal crime will
+put its hand on your door-knob, and dash its awful surge against the
+marble of your door-steps, as the stormy sea drives on a rocky beach.
+
+That condition of morals is now being formed, amid which our children
+must walk. Do you tell me it is none of my business what street
+profanity shall curse my boy's ear, on his way to school? Think you it
+is no concern of yours what infamous advertisements, placarded on
+the walls, or in the public newspaper, shall smite the vision of your
+innocent little ones? Shall I be nervous about a stagnant pool of
+water, lest it breed malaria, and be careless when there are in the
+very heart of our city thousands of houses, devoted to various forms
+of dissipation, which day and night steam with miasma, and pour out
+the fiery lava of pollution, and darken the air with their horrors,
+and fill the skies with the smoke of their torment, that ascendeth up
+forever and ever? If a slaughter-house be opened in the midst of the
+town, we hasten down to the Mayor to have the nuisance abated. But
+now I make complaint, not to the Mayor or Common Council, but to the
+masses of the people, who have the power to lift men up to office, and
+to cast them down, against a hundred thousand slaughter-houses in
+our American cities. In the name of our happy homes, of our refined
+circles, of our schools, of our churches,--in the name of all that is
+dear and beautiful and valuable and holy,--I enter the complaint. If
+you now sit unconcerned, and leave to professed philanthropists
+the work, and care not who are in authority or what laws remain
+unexecuted, you may live to see the time when you will curse the day
+in which your children were born.
+
+My belief is that such an exposition of public immoralities will
+do good, by exciting pity for the victims and wholesale indignation
+against the abettors and perpetrators.
+
+Who is that man fallen against the curbstone, covered with bruises and
+beastliness? He was as bright-faced a lad as ever looked up from your
+nursery. His mother rocked him, prayed for him, fondled him, would
+not let the night air touch his cheek, and held him up and looked down
+into his loving eyes, and wondered for what high position he was being
+fitted. He entered life with bright hopes. The world beckoned him,
+friends cheered him, but the archers shot at him; vile men set traps
+for him, bad habits hooked fast to him with their iron grapples; his
+feet slipped on the way; and there he lies. Who would think that that
+uncombed hair was once toyed with by a father's fingers? Who would
+think that those bloated cheeks were ever kissed by a mother's lips?
+Would you guess that that thick tongue once made a household glad with
+its innocent prattle? Utter no harsh words in his ear. Help him up.
+Put the hat over that once manly brow. Brush the dust from that coat
+that once covered a generous heart. Show him the way to the home that
+once rejoiced at the sound of his footstep, and with gentle words tell
+his children to stand back as you help him through the hall.
+
+That was a kind husband once and an indulgent father. He will kneel
+with them no more as once he did at family prayers--the little ones
+with clasped hands looking up into the heavens with thanksgiving for
+their happy home. But now at midnight he will drive them from their
+pillows and curse them down the steps, and howl after them as, unclad,
+they fly down the street, in night-garments, under the calm starlight.
+
+Who slew that man? Who blasted that home? Who plunged those children
+into worse than orphanage--until the hands are blue with cold, and the
+cheeks are blanched with fear, and the brow is scarred with bruises,
+and the eyes are hollow with grief? Who made that life a wreck, and
+filled eternity with the uproar of a doomed spirit?
+
+There are those whose regular business it is to work this death. They
+mix a cup that glows and flashes and foams with enchantment. They
+call it Cognac, or Hock, or Heidsick, or Schnapps, or Old Bourbon, or
+Brandy, or Champagne; but they tell not that in the ruddy glow there
+is the blood of sacrifice, and in its flash the eye of uncoiled
+adders, and in the foam the mouth-froth of eternal death. Not knowing
+what a horrible mixture it is, men take it up and drink it down--the
+sacrificial blood, the adder's venom, the death-froth--and smack their
+lips and call it a delightful beverage.
+
+Oh! if I had some art by which I could break the charm of the
+tempter's bowl, and with mailed hand lift out the long serpent of
+eternal despair, and shake out its coils, and cast it down, and crush
+it to death!
+
+But the enchantment cannot thus be broken. It hides in the bottom of
+the bowl; and not until a man is entirely fallen does the monster
+lift itself up, and strike with its terrific fangs, and answer all
+his implorations for mercy with fiendish hiss. We must arouse public
+opinion, until city, State, and national officials shall no longer
+dare to neglect the execution of the law. We have enough enactments
+now to revolutionize our cities and strike terror through the
+drinking-houses and gambling-dens and houses of sin. Tracts
+distributed will not do it; Bibles printed will not accomplish it;
+city missionaries have not power for the work.
+
+_Will_ tracts do it? As well try with three or four snow-flakes to put
+out Cotapaxi!
+
+We want police officers, common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs,
+mayors, who will execute the law. Give us for two weeks in our cities
+an honest city hall, and public pollution would fall like lightning
+from heaven!
+
+If you republicans, and you democrats, do not do your duty in this
+regard, we will, after a while, form a party of our own, and put
+men in position pledged to anti-rum, anti-dirt, anti-nuisances,
+anti-monopolies, anti-abominations, and will give to those of you who
+have been so long feeding on public spoils, careless of public morals,
+not so much as the wages of a street sweeper.
+
+We are not discouraged. It may seem to many that all of our battling
+against these evils will come to naught. But if the coral insects can
+lift an island, our feeble efforts, under God, may raise a break-water
+that will dash back the surges of municipal abomination. Beside, we
+toil not in our own strength.
+
+It seemed insignificant for Moses to stretch his hand over the Red
+Sea. What power could that have over the waters? But the east wind
+blew all night; the waters gathered into two glittering palisades on
+either side. The billows reared as God's hand pulled back upon their
+crystal bits. Wheel into line, O Israel! March! March! Pearls crash
+under the feet. The flying spray springs a rainbow arch over the
+victors. The shout of hosts mounting the beach answers the shout of
+hosts mid-sea; until, as the last line of the Israelites have gained
+the beach, the shields clang, and the cymbals clap; and as the waters
+whelm the pursuing foe, the swift-fingered winds on the white keys of
+the foam play the grand march of Israel delivered, and the awful dirge
+of Egyptian overthrow.
+
+So we go forth; and stretch out the hand of prayer and Christian
+effort over these dark, boiling waters of crime and suffering. "Aha!
+Aha!" say the deriding world. But wait. The winds of divine help will
+begin to blow; the way will clear for the great army of Christian
+philanthropists; the glittering treasures of the world's beneficence
+will line the path of our feet; and to the other shore we will be
+greeted with the clash of all heaven's cymbals; while those who resist
+and deride and pursue us will fall under the sea, and there will be
+nothing left of them but here and there, cast high and dry upon the
+beach, the splintered wheel of a chariot, and, thrust out from the
+surf, the breathless nostril of a riderless charger.
+
+
+
+
+WINTER NIGHTS.
+
+
+The inhabitants of one of the old cities were told that they would
+have to fly for their lives. Such flight would be painful, even in
+the flush of spring-time, but superlatively aggravating if in cold
+weather; and therefore they were told to pray that their flight be not
+in the winter.
+
+There is something in the winter season that not only tests our
+physical endurance, but, especially in the city, tries our moral
+character. It is the winter months that ruin, morally, and forever,
+many of our young men. We sit in the house on a winter's night, and
+hear the storm raging on the outside, and imagine the helpless crafts
+driven on the coast; but if our ears were only good enough, we could,
+on any winter night, hear the crash of a hundred moral shipwrecks.
+
+Many who came last September to town, by the first of March will have
+been blasted. It only takes one winter to ruin a young man. When the
+long winter evenings have come, many of our young men will improve
+them in forming a more intimate acquaintance with books, contracting
+higher social friendships, and strengthening and ennobling their
+characters. But not so with all. I will show you before I get through
+that, at this season of the year, temptations are especially rampant:
+and my counsel is, _Look out how you spend your winter nights!_
+
+I remark, first, that there is no season of the year in which vicious
+allurements are so active.
+
+In warm weather, places of dissipation win their tamest triumphs.
+People do not feel like going, in the hot nights of summer, among the
+blazing gas-lights, or breathing the fetid air of assemblages. The
+receipts of the grog-shops in a December night are three times what
+they are in any night in July or August. I doubt not there are
+larger audiences in the casinos in winter than in the summer weather.
+Iniquity plies a more profitable trade. December, January, and
+February are harvest-months for the devil. The play-bills of the low
+entertainments then are more charming, the acting is more exquisite,
+the enthusiasm of the spectators more bewitching. Many a young man who
+makes out to keep right the rest of the year, capsizes now. When he
+came to town in the autumn, his eye was bright, his cheek rosy, his
+step elastic; but, before spring, as you pass him you will say to your
+friend, "What is the matter with that young man?" The fact is that one
+winter of dissipation has done the work of ruin.
+
+This is the season for parties; and, if they are of the right kind,
+our social nature is improved, and our spirits cheered up. But many
+of them are not of the right kind; and our young people, night after
+night, are kept in the whirl of unhealthy excitement until their
+strength fails, and their spirits are broken down, and their taste for
+ordinary life corrupted; and, by the time the spring weather comes,
+they are in the doctor's hands, or sleeping in the cemetery. The
+certificate of their death is made out, and the physician, out of
+regard for the family, calls the disease by some Latin name, when the
+truth is that they died of too many parties.
+
+Away with these wine-drinking convivialities! How dare you, the
+father of a household, trifle with the appetites of our young people?
+Perhaps, out of regard for the minister, or some other weak temperance
+man, you have the decanter in a side-room, where, after refreshments,
+only a select few are invited; and you come back with a glare in your
+eye, and a stench in your breath, that shows that you have been out
+serving the devil.
+
+Some one asks, "For what purpose are these people gone into that
+side-room?"
+
+"O," replies one who has just come out, smacking his lips, "they have
+gone in to see the white dog!"
+
+The excuse which Christian men often give for this is, that it is
+necessary, after such late eating, by some sort of stimulant to help
+digestion. My plain opinion is, that if a man have no more control
+over his appetite than to stuff himself until his digestive organs
+refuse to do their office, he ought not to call himself a man, but
+rather to class himself among the beasts that perish. I take the words
+of the Lord Almighty, and cry, "Woe to him that putteth the bottle to
+his neighbor's lips!"
+
+Young man, take it as the counsel of a friend, when I bid you _be
+cautious where you spend your winter evenings_. Thank God that you
+have lived to see the glad winter days in which your childhood was
+made cheerful by the faces of fathers and mothers, brothers and
+sisters, some of whom, alas! will never again wish you a "happy New
+Year," or a "Merry Christmas."
+
+Let no one tempt you out of your sobriety. I have seen respectable
+young men of the best families drunk on New Year's day. The excuse
+they gave for the inebriation was that the _ladies_ insisted on their
+taking it. There have been instances where the delicate hand of woman
+hath kindled a young man's taste for strong drink, who after many
+years, when the attractions of that holiday scene were all forgotten,
+crouched in her rags, and her desolation, and her woe under the
+uplifted hand of the drunken monster who, on that Christmas morning
+so long ago, took the glass from her hand. And so, the woman stands on
+the abutment of the bridge, on the moon-lit night, wondering if, down
+under the water, there is not some quiet place for a broken heart. She
+takes one wild leap,--and all is over!
+
+Ah! mingle not with the harmless beverage of your festive scene this
+poison of adders! Mix not with the white sugar of the cup the snow
+of this awful leprosy! Mar not the clatter of cutlery at the holiday
+feast with the clank of a madman's chain!
+
+Stop and look into the window of that pawnbroker's shop. Elegant furs.
+Elegant watches. Elegant scarfs. Elegant flutes. People stand with a
+pleased look gazing at these things; but I look in with a shudder, as
+though I had seen into a window of hell.
+
+Whose elegant watch was that? It was a drunkard's watch!
+
+Whose furs? They belonged to a drunkard's wife!
+
+Whose flute? Whose shoes? Whose scarf? They belonged to a drunkard's
+child!
+
+If I could, I would take the three brazen balls hanging at the
+door-way, and clang them together until they tolled the awful knell
+of the drunkard's soul. The pawnbroker's shop is only one eddy of the
+great stream of municipal drunkenness.
+
+Stand back, young man! Take not the first step in the path that leads
+here. Let not the flame of strong drink ever scorch your tongue. You
+may tamper with these things and escape, but your influence will be
+wrong. Can you not make a sacrifice for the good of others?
+
+When the good ship _London_ went down, the captain was told that there
+was a way of escape in one of the life-boats. He said--"No; I will go
+down with the rest of the passengers!" All the world acknowledged that
+heroism.
+
+Can you not deny yourself insignificant indulgences for the good of
+others? Be not allured by the fact that you drink only the moderate
+beverages. You take only ale; and a man has to drink a large amount of
+it to become intoxicated. Yes; but there is not in all the city to-day
+an inebriate that did not _begin_ with ale.
+
+"XXX:" What does that mark mean? XXX on the beer-barrel: XXX on the
+brewer's dray: XXX on the door of the gin-shop: XXX on the side of
+the bottle. Not being able to find any one who could tell me what this
+mark means, I have had to guess that the whole thing was an allegory:
+XXX--that is, thirty heartbreaks. Thirty agonies. Thirty desolated
+homes. Thirty chances for a drunkard's grave. Thirty ways to
+perdition.
+
+"XXX." If I were going to write a story, the first chapter would be
+XXX.; the last--"A pawnbroker's shop."
+
+Be watchful! At this season all the allurements to dissipation will be
+especially busy. Let not your flight to hell be in the winter.
+
+I also remark that the winter evenings, through their very length,
+allow great swing for indulgences. Few young men would have the taste
+to go to their room at seven o'clock, and sit until eleven, reading
+_Motley's Dutch Republic_ or _John Foster's Essays_. The young men
+who have been confined to the store all day want fresh air and
+sight-seeing; and they must go somewhere. The most of them have, of
+a winter's evening, three or four hours of leisure. After the evening
+repast, the young man puts on his hat and coat and goes out.
+
+"Come in here," cries one form of allurement.
+
+"Come in here," cries another.
+
+"Go;" says Satan. "You ought to see for yourself."
+
+"Why don't you go?" says a comrade. "It is a shame for a young man
+to be as _green_ as you are. By this time you ought to have seen
+everything."
+
+Especially is temptation strong in such times as this, when business
+is dull. I have noticed that men spend more money when they have
+little to spend.
+
+The tremendous question to be settled by our great populace, day by
+day, is how to get a livelihood. Many of our young men, just starting
+for themselves, are very much discouraged. They had hoped before this
+to have set up a household of their own. But their gains have been
+slow, and their discouragements many. The young man can hardly take
+care of himself. How can he take care of another? And, to the curse
+of modern society, before a young man is able to set up a home of his
+own, he is expected to have enough to support in idleness somebody
+else; when God intended that they should begin together, and jointly
+earn a livelihood. So, many of our young men are utterly discouraged,
+and utterly unfit to resist temptation.
+
+The time the pirate bears down upon the ship is when its sails are
+down and it is making no headway.
+
+People wish they had more time to think. The trouble is now, that
+people have too much time to think. Give to many of our commercial men
+the four hours of these winter nights, with nothing to divert them,
+and before spring they will have lodgings in an insane asylum.
+
+I remark further, that the winter is especially trying to the moral
+character of our young men, because some of their homes in winter are
+especially unattractive. In summer they can sit on the steps, or have
+a bouquet in the vase on the mantel; and the evenings are so short
+that soon after gas-light they feel like retiring. Parents do not take
+enough pains to make these long winter nights attractive.
+
+It is strange that old people know so little about young people. One
+would think that they had never been young themselves, but had been
+born with their spectacles on. It is dolorous for young people to
+spend the three or four hours of a winter's evening with parents
+who sit talking over their own ailments and misfortunes, and the
+nothingness of this world. How dare you talk such blasphemy? God was
+busy six days in making the world, and has allowed it to hang six
+thousand years on his holy heart; and that world hath fed you, and
+clothed you, and shone on you for fifty years: and yet you talk about
+the nothingness of this world! Do you expect the young people in
+your family to sit a whole evening and hear you groan about this
+magnificent, star-lighted, sun-warmed, shower-baptized, flower-strewn,
+angel-watched, God-inhabited planet? From such homes young men make a
+wild plunge into dissipation. Many of you have the means: why do you
+not buy them a violin or a picture? or have your daughter cultured in
+music until she can help to make home attractive?
+
+There are ten thousand ways of lighting up the domestic circle. It
+requires no large income, no big house, no rich wardrobe, no chased
+silver, no gorgeous upholstery, but a parental heart awake to its
+duty.
+
+Have a doleful home and your children will not stay in it, though
+you block up the door with Bibles, and tie fast to them a million
+Heidelberg catechisms.
+
+I said to a man, "This is a beautiful tree in front of your house."
+
+He answered, with a whine, "Yes; but it will fade."
+
+I said to him, "You have a beautiful garden."
+
+He replied, "Yes; but it will perish."
+
+I found out afterward that his son was a vagabond, and I was not
+surprised at it.
+
+You cannot groan men into decency, but you can groan them out.
+
+Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter! Devote these December,
+January and February evenings to high pursuits, innocent amusements,
+intelligent socialities, and Christian attainments. Do not waste this
+winter. We shall soon have seen the last snow-shower, and have passed
+up into the companionship of Him whose raiment is exceeding white as
+snow--as no fuller on earth can whiten it.
+
+To the right-hearted, the winter nights of earth will soon end in the
+June morning of heaven.
+
+The River of God, from under the Throne, never freezes over. The
+foliage of Life's fair tree is never frost-bitten. The festivals, and
+hilarities, and family gatherings of Christmas times on earth, will
+give way to the larger reunions, and the brighter lights, and the
+gladder scenes, and the sweeter garlands, and the richer feastings of
+the great holiday of Heaven.
+
+
+
+
+THE POWER OF CLOTHES.
+
+
+One cannot always tell by a man's coat what kind of a heart he has
+under it; still, his dress is apt to be the out-blossoming of his
+character, and is not to be disregarded.
+
+We make no indiscriminate onslaught upon customs of dress. Why did
+God put spots on the pansy, or etch the fern leaf? And what are
+china-asters good for if style and color are of no importance?
+
+The realm is as wide as the world, and as far-reaching as all the
+generations, over which fashion hath extended her sceptre. For
+thousands of years she hath sat queen over all the earth, and the
+revolutions that rock down all other thrones have not in the slighest
+affected her domination. Other constitutions have been torn, and other
+laws trampled; but to her decrees conquerors have bowed their plumes,
+and kings have uncovered. Victoria is not Queen of England; Napoleon
+was not Emperor of France; Isabella was not Queen of Spain. _Fashion_
+has been regnant over all the earth; and lords and dukes, kings and
+queens, have been the subjects of her realm.
+
+She arranged the mantle of the patriarch, and the toga of the Roman;
+the small shoe of the Chinese women, and the turban of the Turk;
+the furs of the Laplander, and the calumet of the Indian chieftain.
+Hottentot and Siberian obey the mandate, as well as Englishman and
+American. Her laws are written on parchment and palm-leaf, on broken
+arch and cathedral tracery. She arranged how the Egyptian mummy should
+be wound, and how Caesar should ride, and how the Athenians should
+speak, and how through the Venetian canals the gondoliers should row
+their pleasure-boat. Her hand hath hung the pillars with embroidery,
+and strewn the floor with plush. Her loom hath woven fabrics graceful
+as the snow and pure as the light. Her voice is heard in the gold
+mart, in the roar of the street, in the shuffle of the crowded
+bazaars, in the rattle of the steam-presses, and in the songs of the
+churches.
+
+You have limited your observation of the sway of fashion if you have
+considered it only as it decides individual and national costumes.
+It makes the rules of behavior. It wields an influence in artistic
+spheres--often deciding what pictures shall hang in the house, what
+music shall be played, what ornaments shall stand upon the mantle.
+The poor man will not have on his wall the cheap wood-cut that he can
+afford, because he cannot have a great daub like that which hangs on
+the rich man's wall, and costing three hundred dollars.
+
+Fashion helps to make up religious belief. It often decides to what
+church we shall go, and what religious tenets we shall adopt. It goes
+into the pulpit, and decides the gown, and the surplice, and the style
+of rhetoric.
+
+It goes into literature and arranges the binding, the type, the
+illustrations of the book, and oftentimes the sentiments expressed and
+the theories evolved.
+
+Men the most independent in feeling are by it compelled to submit to
+social customs. And before I stop I want to show you that fashion has
+been one of the most potent of reformers, and one of the vilest of
+usurpers. Sometimes it has been an angel from heaven, and at others it
+has been the mother of harlots.
+
+As the world grows better there will be as much fashion as now, but
+it will be a different fashion. In the future life white robes always
+have been and always will be in the fashion.
+
+There is a great outcry against this submission to social custom,
+as though any consultation of the tastes and feelings of others were
+deplorable; but without it the world would have neither law, order,
+civilization, nor common decency.
+
+There has been a canonization of bluntness. There are men and women
+who boast that they can tell you all they know and hear about you,
+especially if it be unpleasant. Some have mistaken rough behavior for
+frankness, when the two qualities do not belong to the same family.
+You have no right, with your eccentricities, to crash in upon the
+sensitiveness of others. There is no virtue in walking with hoofs over
+fine carpets. The most jagged rock is covered with blossoming moss.
+The storm that comes jarring down in thunder strews rainbow colors
+upon the sky, and silvery drops on orchard and meadow.
+
+There are men who pride themselves on their capacity to "stick"
+others. They say "I have brought him down: Didn't I make him squirm!"
+
+Others pride themselves on their outlandish apparel. They boast of
+being out of the fashion. They wear a queer hat. They ride in an odd
+carriage. By dint of perpetual application they would persuade the
+world that they are perfectly indifferent to public opinion. They are
+more proud of being "out of fashion" than others are of being in. They
+are utterly and universally disagreeable. Their rough corners have
+never been worn off. They prefer a hedge-hog to a lamb.
+
+The accomplishments of life are in nowise productive of effeminacy
+or enervation. Good manners and a respect for the tastes of others
+is indispensable. The Good Book speaks favorably of those who are
+a "_peculiar_" people; but that does not sanction the behavior of
+_queer_ people. There is no excuse, under any circumstances, for not
+being and acting the lady or gentleman. Rudeness is sin. We have no
+words too ardent to express our admiration for the refinements of
+society. There is no law, moral or divine, to forbid elegance of
+demeanor, ornaments of gold or gems for the person, artistic display
+in the dwelling, gracefulness of gait and bearing, polite salutation,
+or honest compliments; and he who is shocked or offended by these had
+better, like the old Scythians, wear tiger-skins, and take one wild
+leap back into midnight barbarism.
+
+As Christianity advances there will be better apparel, higher styles
+of architecture, more exquisite adornments, sweeter music, grander
+pictures, more correct behavior, and more thorough ladies and
+gentlemen.
+
+But there is another story to be told. Excessive fashion is to be
+charged with many of the worst evils of society, and its path has
+often been strewn with the bodies of the slain.
+
+It has often set up a false standard by which people are to be
+judged. Our common sense, as well as all the divine intimations on the
+subject, teach us that people ought to be esteemed according to their
+individual and moral attainments. The man who has the most nobility
+of soul should be first, and he who has the least of such qualities
+should stand last. No crest, or shield, or escutcheon, can indicate
+one's moral peerage. Titles of duke, lord, esquire, earl, viscount,
+or patrician, ought not to raise one into the first rank. Some of
+the meanest men I have ever known had at the end of their name D.D.,
+LL.D., and F.R.S. Truth, honor, charity, heroism, self-sacrifice,
+should win highest favor; but inordinate fashion says--"Count not a
+woman's virtues; count her rings;" "Look not at the contour of the
+head, but see the way she combs her hair;" "Ask not what noble deeds
+have been accomplished by that man's hand; but is it white and soft?"
+Ask not what good sense was in her conversation, but "in what was she
+dressed." Ask not whether there was hospitality and cheerfulness in
+the house, but "in what style do they live."
+
+As a consequence, some of the most ignorant and vicious men are at
+the top, and some of the most virtuous and intelligent at the bottom.
+During the late war we suddenly saw men hurled up into the highest
+social positions. Had they suddenly reformed from evil habits? or
+graduated in a science? or achieved some good work for society? No!
+They simply had obtained a government contract!
+
+This accounts for the utter chagrin which men feel at the treatment
+they receive when they lose their property. Hold up your head amid
+financial disaster, like a Christian! Fifty thousand subtracted from a
+good man leaves how much? Honor; Truth; Faith in God; Triumphant Hope;
+and a kingdom of ineffable glory, over which he is to reign forever
+and ever.
+
+If a millionnaire should lose a penny out of his pocket, would he sit
+down on a curb-stone and cry? And shall a man possessed of everlasting
+fortunes wear himself out with grief because he has lost worldly
+treasure? You have only lost that in which hundreds of wretched
+misers surpass you; and you have saved that which the Caesars, and the
+Pharaohs, and the Alexanders could never afford.
+
+And yet society thinks differently; and you see the most intimate
+friendships broken up as the consequence of financial embarrassments.
+You say to some one--"How is your friend ----?" The man looks bewildered,
+and says, "I do not know." You reply, "Why; you used to be intimate."
+"Well," says the man, "our friendship has been dropped: the man has
+failed."
+
+Proclamation has gone forth: "Velvets must go up, and homespun must
+come down;" and the question is "How does the coat fit?"--not, "Who
+wears it?" The power that bears the tides of excited population up
+and down our streets, and rocks the world of commerce, and thrills all
+nations, Transatlantic and Cisatlantic, is--_clothes_. It decides
+the last offices of respect; and how long the dress shall be totally
+black; and when it may subside into spots of grief on silk, calico, or
+gingham. Men die in good circumstances, but by reason of extravagant
+funeral expenses are well nigh insolvent before they get buried. Many
+men would not die at all, if they had to wait until they could afford
+it.
+
+Excessive fashion is productive of a most ruinous strife. The
+expenditure of many households is adjusted by what their neighbors
+have, not by what they themselves can afford to have; and the great
+anxiety is as to who shall have the finest house and the most costly
+equipage. The weapons used in the warfare of social life are not
+Minie rifles, and Dahlgren guns, and Hotchkiss shells, but chairs
+and mirrors, and vases, and Gobelins, and Axminsters. Many household
+establishments are like racing steamboats, propelled at the utmost
+strain and risk, and just coming to a terrific explosion. "Who cares,"
+say they, "if we only come out ahead?"
+
+There is no one cause to-day of more financial embarrassment, and of
+more dishonesties, than this determination, at all hazards, to live as
+well as or better than other people. There are persons who will risk
+their eternity upon one fine looking-glass, or who will dash out the
+splendors of heaven to get another trinket.
+
+"My house is too small." "But," says some one, "you cannot pay for a
+larger." "Never mind that; my friends have a better residence, and so
+will I." "A dress of that pattern I must have. I cannot afford it by
+a great deal; but who cares for that? My neighbor had one from that
+pattern, and I must have one." There are scores of men in the dungeons
+of the penitentiary, who risked honor, business,--everything, in the
+effort to shine like others. Though the heavens fall, they must be "in
+the fashion."
+
+The most famous frauds of the day have resulted from this feeling. It
+keeps hundreds of men struggling for their commercial existence. The
+trouble is that some are caught and incarcerated, if their larceny
+be small. If it be great, they escape, and build their castle on the
+Rhine. Men go into jail, not because they steal, but because they did
+not steal enough.
+
+Again: excessive fashion makes people unnatural and untrue. It is a
+factory from which has come forth more hollow pretences, and unmeaning
+flatteries, and hypocrisies, than the Lowell Mills ever turned out
+shawls and garments.
+
+Fashion is the greatest of all liars. It has made society insincere.
+You know not what to believe. When people ask you to come, you do
+not know whether or not they want you to come. When they send their
+regards, you do not know whether it is an expression of their heart,
+or an external civility. We have learned to take almost everything at
+a discount. Word is sent, "Not at home," when they are only too lazy
+to dress themselves. They say, "The furnace has just gone out," when
+in truth they have had no fire in it all winter. They apologize
+for the unusual barrenness of their table, when they never live any
+better. They decry their most luxurious entertainments, to win a
+shower of approval. They apologize for their appearance, as though it
+were unusual, when always at home they look just so. They would make
+you believe that some nice sketch on the wall was the work of a master
+painter. "It was an heir-loom, and once hung on the walls of a castle;
+and a duke gave it to their grandfather." People who will lie about
+nothing else, will lie about a picture. On a small income we must make
+the world believe that we are affluent, and our life becomes a cheat,
+a counterfeit, and a sham.
+
+Few persons are really natural. When I say this, I do not mean to slur
+cultured manners. It is right that we should have more admiration for
+the sculptured marble than for the unhewn block of the quarry. From
+many circles in life fashion has driven out vivacity and enthusiasm.
+A frozen dignity instead floats about the room, and iceberg grinds
+against iceberg. You must not laugh outright: it is vulgar. You must
+_smile_. You must not dash rapidly across the room: you must _glide_.
+There is a round of bows, and grins, and flatteries, and oh's! and
+ah's! and simperings, and namby-pambyism--a world of which is not
+worth one good, round, honest peal of laughter. From such a hollow
+round the tortured guest retires at the close of the evening, and
+assures his host that he has enjoyed himself.
+
+Thus social life has been contorted, and deformed, until, in
+some mountain cabin, where rustics gather to the quilting or the
+apple-paring, there is more good cheer than in all the frescoed
+ice-houses of the metropolis.
+
+We want, in all the higher circles of society, more warmth of heart
+and naturalness of behavior, and not so many refrigerators.
+
+Again: inordinate fashion is incompatible with happiness. Those who
+depend for their comfort upon the admiration of others are subject to
+frequent disappointment. Somebody will criticise their appearance, or
+surpass them in brilliancy, or will receive more attention. Oh! the
+jealousy, and detraction, and heart-burnings of those who move in this
+bewildered maze!
+
+The clock strikes _one_, and the company begins to disperse. The host
+has done everything to make all his guests happy; but now that they
+are on the street, hear their criticisms of everybody and everything.
+"Did you see her in such and such apparel?" "Wasn't she a perfect
+fright!" "What a pity that such an one is so awkward and uncouth!"
+"Well, really,--I would rather never be spoken to than be seen with
+such a man as that!"
+
+Poor butterflies! Bright wings do not always bring happiness. "She
+that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth." The revelations
+of high life that come to the challenge and the fight are only the
+occasional croppings out of disquietudes that are, underneath, like
+the stars of heaven for multitude, but like the demons of the pit for
+hate. The misery that to-night in the cellar cuddles up in the straw
+is not so utter as the princely disquietude which stalks through
+splendid drawing-rooms, brooding over the slights and offences of high
+life. The bitterness of trouble seems not so unfitting, when drunk
+out of a pewter mug, as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden
+chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary's pistol, putting an
+end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow,
+fastidious life there is no peace.
+
+Again: Excessive devotion to fashion is productive of physical
+disease, mental imbecility, and spiritual withering.
+
+Apparel insufficient to keep out the cold and the rain, or so fitted
+upon the person that the functions of life are restrained; late hours,
+filled with excitement and feasting; free draughts of wine, that make
+one not beastly intoxicated, but only fashionably drunk; and luxurious
+indolence--are the instruments by which this unreal life pushes its
+disciples into valetudinarianism and the grave. Along the walks
+of high life Death goes a mowing--and such harvests as are reaped!
+_Materia medica_ has been exhausted to find curatives for these
+physiological devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions, gout, and
+almost every infirmity in all the realm of pathology, have been the
+penalty paid. To counteract the damage, pharmacy has gone forth with
+medicament, panacea, elixir, embrocation, salve, and cataplasm.
+
+To-night, with swollen feet, upon cushioned ottoman, and groaning
+with aches innumerable, is the votary of luxurious living, not half so
+happy as his groom or coal-heaver.
+
+Fashion is the world's undertaker, and drives thousands of hearses to
+Laurel Hill and Greenwood.
+
+But, worse than that, this folly is an intellectual depletion. This
+endless study of proprieties and etiquette, patterns and styles, is
+bedwarfing to the intellect. I never knew a man or a woman of extreme
+fashion that knew much. How belittling the study of the cut of a coat,
+or the tie of a cravat, or the wrinkle in a shoe, or the color of a
+ribbon! How they are worried if something gets untied, or hangs awry,
+or is not nicely adjusted! With a mind capable of measuring the
+height and depth of great subjects; able to unravel mysteries; to
+walk through the universe; to soar up into the infinity of God's
+attributes,--hovering perpetually over a new style of mantilla! I have
+known men, reckless as to their character, and regardless of interests
+momentous and eternal, exasperated by the shape of a vest-button!
+
+What is the matter with that woman--wrought up into the agony of
+despair? O, her muff is out of fashion!
+
+Worse than all--this folly is not satisfied until it has extirpated
+every moral sentiment, and blasted the soul. A wardrobe is the rock
+upon which many a soul has been riven. The excitement of a luxurious
+life has been the vortex that has swallowed up more souls than the
+Maelstrom off Norway ever devoured ships. What room for elevating
+themes in a heart filled with the trivial and unreal? Who can wonder
+that in this haste for sun-gilded bawbles and winged thistle-down,
+men should tumble into ruin? The travellers to destruction are not
+all clothed in rags. On that road chariot jostles against chariot; and
+behind steeds in harness golden-plated and glittering, they go down,
+coach and four, herald and postilion, racketing on the hot pavements
+of hell. Clear the track! Bazaars hang out their colors over the road;
+and trees of tropical fruitfulness overbranch the way. No sound of
+woe disturbs the air; but all is light and song, and wine and
+gorgeousness. The world comes out to greet the dazzling procession
+with Hurrah! and Hurrah! But, suddenly, there is a halt and an outcry
+of dismay, and an overthrow worse than the Red Sea tumbling upon the
+Egyptians. Shadow of grave-stones upon finest silk! Wormwood squeezed
+into impearled goblets! Death, with one cold breath, withering the
+leaves and freezing the fountains.
+
+In the wild tumult of the last day--the mountains falling, the heavens
+flying, the thrones uprising, the universe assembling; amid the boom
+of the last great thunder-peal, and under the crackling of a burning
+world--what will become of the fop and the dandy?
+
+He who is genuinely refined will be useful and happy. There is no gate
+that a gentleman's hand cannot open. During his last sickness there
+will be a timid knock at the basement door by those who have come to
+see how he is.
+
+But watch the career of one thoroughly artificial. Through
+inheritance, or perhaps his own skill, having obtained enough for
+purposes of display, he feels himself thoroughly established. He sits
+aloof from the common herd, and looks out of his window upon the poor
+man, and says--"Put that dirty wretch off my steps immediately!" On
+Sabbath days he finds the church, but mourns the fact that he must
+worship with so many of the inelegant, and says, "They are perfectly
+awful!" "That man that you put in my pew had a coat on his back that
+did not cost five dollars." He struts through life unsympathetic with
+trouble, and says, "I cannot be bothered." Is delighted with some
+doubtful story of Parisian life, but thinks that there are some very
+indecent things in the Bible. Walks arm in arm with a millionnaire,
+but does not know his own brother. Loves to be praised for his
+splendid house; and when told that he looks younger than ten years
+ago, says--"Well, really; do you think so!"
+
+But the brief strut of his life is about over. Up-stairs--he dies.
+No angel wings hovering about him. No gospel promises kindling up the
+darkness;--but exquisite embroidery, elegant pictures, and a bust of
+Shakespeare on the mantel. The pulses stop. The minister comes in to
+read of the Resurrection, that day when the dead shall come up--both
+he that died on the floor, and he that expired under princely
+upholstery. He is carried out to burial. Only a few mourners, but
+a great array of carriages. Not one common man at the funeral. No
+befriended orphan to weep a tear upon his grave. No child of want
+pressing through the ranks of the weeping, saying--"He is the last
+friend I have; and I must see him."
+
+What now? He was a great man: Shall not chariots of salvation come
+down to the other side of the Jordan, and escort him up to the palace?
+Shall not the angels exclaim--"Turn out! a prince is coming." Will the
+bells chime? Will there be harpers with their harps, and trumpeters
+with their trumpets?
+
+No! No! No! There will be a shudder, as though a calamity had
+happened. Standing on heaven's battlement, a watchman will see
+something shoot past, with fiery downfall, and shriek: "Wandering
+star--for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever!"
+
+With the funeral pageant the brilliant career terminated. There was a
+great array of carriages.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER MIDNIGHT.
+
+
+When night came down on Babylon, Nineveh, and Jerusalem, they needed
+careful watching, otherwise the incendiary's torch might have been
+thrust into the very heart of the metropolitan splendor; or enemies,
+marching from the hills, might have forced the gates. All night long,
+on top of the wall and in front of the gates, might be heard the
+measured step of the watchman on his solitary beat; silence hung in
+air, save as some passer-by raised the question: "Watchman, what of
+the night?"
+
+It is to me a deeply suggestive and solemn thing to see a man standing
+guard by night. It thrilled through me, as at the gate of an arsenal
+in Charleston, the question once smote me, "Who comes there?" followed
+by the sharp command: "Advance and give the countersign." Every moral
+teacher stands on picket, or patrols the wall as watchman. His work
+is to sound the alarm; and whether it be in the first watch, in
+the second watch, in the third watch, or in the fourth watch, to be
+vigilant until the daybreak flings its "morning glories" of blooming
+cloud across the arching trellis of the sky.
+
+The ancients divided their night into four parts--the first watch,
+from six to nine; the second, from nine to twelve; the third, from
+twelve to three; and the fourth, from three to six.
+
+I speak now of the city in the third watch, or from twelve to three
+o'clock.
+
+I never weary of looking upon the life and brilliancy of the city in
+the _first_ watch. That is the hour when the stores are closing. The
+laboring men, having quitted the scaffolding and the shop, are on
+their way home. It rejoices me to give them my seat in the city car.
+They have stood and hammered away all day. Their feet are weary. They
+are exhausted with the tug of work. They are mostly cheerful. With
+appetites sharpened on the swift turner's wheel and the carpenter's
+whetstone, they seek the evening meal. The clerks, too, have broken
+away from the counter, and with brain weary of the long line of
+figures, and the whims of those who go a-shopping, seek the face of
+mother, or wife and child. The merchants are unharnessing themselves
+from their anxieties, on their way up the street. The boys that lock
+up are heaving away at the shutters, shoving the heavy bolts, and
+taking a last look at the fire to see that all is safe. The streets
+are thronged with young men, setting out from the great centres of
+bargain-making.
+
+Let idlers clear the street, and give right of way to the besweated
+artisans and merchants! They have _earned_ their bread, and are now on
+their way home to get it.
+
+The lights in full jet hang over ten thousand evening repasts--the
+parents at either end of the table, the children between. Thank God!
+"who setteth the solitary in families!"
+
+A few hours later, and all the places of amusement, good and bad, are
+in full tide. Lovers of art, catalogue in hand, stroll through the
+galleries and discuss the pictures. The ball-room is resplendent with
+the rich apparel of those who, on either side of the white, glistening
+boards, await the signal from the orchestra. The footlights of the
+theatre flash up; the bell rings, and the curtain rises; and out from
+the gorgeous scenery glide the actors, greeted with the vociferation
+of the expectant multitudes. Concert-halls are lifted into enchantment
+with the warble of one songstress, or swept out on a sea of tumultuous
+feeling by the blast of brazen instruments. Drawing-rooms are filled
+with all gracefulness of apparel, with all sweetness of sound, with
+all splendor of manner; mirrors are catching up and multiplying the
+scene, until it seems as if in infinite corridors there were garlanded
+groups advancing and retreating.
+
+The out-door air rings with laughter, and with the moving to and fro
+of thousands on the great promenades. The dashing span, adrip with
+the foam of the long country ride, rushes past as you halt at the
+curb-stone.
+
+Mirth, revelry, beauty, fashion, magnificence mingle in the great
+metropolitan picture, until the thinking man goes home to think more
+seriously, and the praying man to pray more earnestly.
+
+A beautiful and overwhelming thing is the city in the first and second
+watches of the night.
+
+But the clock strikes twelve, and the third watch begins. The thunder
+of the city has rolled from the air. Slight sounds now cut the night
+with a distinctness that excites your attention. You hear the tinkling
+of the bell of the street-car in the far distance; the baying of the
+dog; the stamp of the horse in the adjoining street; the slamming of
+a saloon door; the hiccoughing of the inebriate; and the shriek of
+the steam-whistle five miles away. Solemn and stupendous is this third
+watch. There are respectable men abroad. The city missionary is
+going up that court, to take a scuttle of coal to a poor family. The
+undertaker goes up the steps of that house, from which there comes a
+bitter cry, as though the destroying angel had smitten the first-born.
+The minister of Jesus passes along; he has been giving the sacrament
+to a dying Christian. The physician hastens past, the excited
+messenger a few steps ahead, impatient to reach the threshold. Men who
+are forced to toil into the midnight are hastening to their pillow.
+But the great multitudes are asleep. The lights are out in the
+dwellings, save here and there one. That is the light of the watcher,
+for the remedies must be administered, and the fever guarded, and the
+restless tossing of the coverlet resisted, and the ice kept upon the
+temples, and the perpetual prayer offered by hearts soon to be broken.
+The street-lamps, standing in long line, reveal the silence and the
+slumber of the town.
+
+Stupendous thought: a great city asleep! Weary arm gathering strength
+for to-morrow's toil. Hot brain getting cooled off. Rigid muscles
+relaxing. Excited nerves being soothed. White locks of the
+octogenarian in thin drifts across the white pillow--fresh fall of
+flakes on snow already fallen. Children with dimpled hands thrown put
+over the pillow, with every breath inhaling a new store of fun and
+frolic.
+
+Let the great hosts sleep! A slumberless Eye will watch them. Silent
+be the alarm-bells and merciful the elements! Let one great wave of
+refreshing slumber roll across the heart of the great town, submerging
+trouble and weariness and pain. It is the third watch of the night,
+and time for the city to sleep.
+
+But be not deceived. There are thousands of people in the great
+town who will not sleep a moment to-night. Go up that dark court. Be
+careful, or you will fall over the prostrate form of a drunkard lying
+on his own worn step. Look about you, or you will feel the garroter's
+hug. Try to look in through that broken pane! What do you see?
+Nothing. But listen. What is it? "God help us!" No footlights, but
+tragedy--mightier, ghastlier than Ristori or Edwin Booth ever acted.
+No bread. No light. No fire. No cover. They lie strewn upon the
+floor--two whole families in one room. They shiver in the darkness.
+They have had no food to-day. You say: "Why don't they beg?" They did
+beg, but got nothing. You say: "Hand them over to the almshouse."
+
+Ah! they had rather die than go to the almshouse. Have you never heard
+the bitter cry of the man or of the child when told that he must go to
+the almshouse?
+
+You say that these are vicious poor, and have brought their own
+misfortune on themselves.
+
+So much the more to be pitied. The Christian poor--God helps them!
+Through their night there twinkles the round, merry star of hope, and
+through the cracked window-pane of their hovel they see the crystals
+of heaven. But the vicious are the more to be pitied. They have no
+hope. They are in hell now. They have put out their last light. People
+excuse themselves from charity by saying they do not deserve to be
+helped. If I have ten prayers for the innocent, I shall have twenty
+for the guilty. If a ship be dashed upon the rocks, the fisherman, in
+his hut on the beach, will wrap the warmest flannels around those who
+are the most chilled and battered. The vicious poor have suffered
+two awful wrecks, the wreck of the body, and the wreck of the soul; a
+wreck for time and a wreck for eternity.
+
+Go up that alley! Open the door. It is not locked. They have nothing
+to lose. No burglar would want anything that is there. There is only a
+broken chair set against the door. Strike a match and look around you.
+Beastliness and rags! A shock of hair hanging over the scarred visage.
+Eyes glaring upon you. Offer no insult. Be careful what you say. Your
+life is not worth much in such a place. See that red mark on the wall.
+That is the mark of a murderer's hand. From the corner a wild face
+starts out of the straw and moves toward you, just as your light goes
+out.
+
+Strike another match. Here is a little babe. It does not laugh. It
+never will laugh. A sea-flower flung on an awfully barren beach: O
+that the Shepherd would fold that lamb! Wrap your shawl about you,
+for the January wind sweeps in. Strike another match. The face of that
+young woman is bruised and gashed now, but a mother once gazed upon it
+in ecstasy of fondness. Awful stare of two eyes that seem looking up
+from the bottom of woe. Stand back. No hope has dawned on that soul
+for years. Hope never will dawn upon it. Utter no scorn. The match has
+gone out. Light it not again, for it would seem to be a mockery.
+
+Pass out! Pass on! Know that there are thousands of such abodes in our
+cities. An awful, gloomy, and overwhelming picture is the city in the
+third watch.
+
+After midnight the crime of the city does its chief work. At eight
+and a half o'clock in the evening the criminals of the city are at
+leisure. They are mostly in the drinking saloons. It needs courage to
+do what they propose to do. Rum makes men reckless. They are getting
+their brain and hand just right. Toward midnight they go to their
+garrets. They gather their tools. Soon after the third watch they
+stalk forth, silently, looking out for the police, through the alleys
+to their appointed work. This is a burglar; and the door-lock will fly
+open at the touch of the false keys. That is an incendiary; and before
+morning there will be a light on the sky, and a cry of "Fire! Fire!"
+That is an assassin; and a lifeless body will be found to-morrow in
+some of the vacant lots.
+
+During all the day there are hundreds of villains to be found lounging
+about, a part of the time asleep, apart of the time awake; but at
+twelve to-night they will rouse up, and their eyes will be keen, and
+their minds acute, and their arms strong, and their foot fleet to fly
+or pursue. Many of them have been brought up to the work. They were
+born in a thief's garret. Their childish plaything was a burglar's
+dark lantern. As long ago as they can remember, they saw, toward
+morning, the mother binding up the father's head, wounded by a
+watchman's billet. They began by picking boys' pockets, and now they
+can dig an underground passage to the cellar of the bank, or will
+blast open the door of the gold vault. So long as the children of the
+street are neglected there will be no lack of desperadoes.
+
+In the third watch of the night the gambling-houses are in full blast.
+What though the hours of the night are slipping away, and the wife
+sits waiting in the cheerless home! Stir up the fires! Bring on the
+drinks! Put up the stakes! A whole fortune may be made before morning!
+Some of the firms that two years ago first put out their sign of
+copartnership have already foundered on the gambler's table. The
+money-drawer in many a mercantile house will this year mysteriously
+spring a leak. Gaming is a portentous vice, and is making great efforts
+to become respectable. Recently a member of Congress played with a
+member elect, carrying off a trophy of one hundred and twenty thousand
+dollars. The old-fashioned way of getting a fortune is too slow! Let
+us toss up and see who shall have it!
+
+And so it goes, from the wheezing wretches who pitch pennies in a rum
+grocery, to the millionnaire gamblers in the gold-market.
+
+After midnight the eye of God will look down and see uncounted
+gambling-saloons plying their destruction. Passing down the street
+to-night, you may hear the wrangling of the gamblers mingling with
+the rattle of the dice, and the clear, sharp crack of the balls on the
+billiard-table.
+
+The finest rooms in the city are gambling dens. In gilded parlor, amid
+costly tapestry, you may behold these dens of death. These houses have
+walls attractive with elaborate fresco and gems of painting--no sham
+artist's daub, but a masterpiece. Mantel and table glitter with vases
+and statuettes. Divans and lounges with deep cushions, the perfection
+of upholstery, invite to rest and repose. Aquaria alive with fins and
+strewn with tinged shells and zoophytes. Tufts of geranium, from bead
+baskets, suspended mid-room, drop their witching perfume. Fountains
+gushing up, sprinkling the air with sparkles, or gushing through the
+mouth of the marble lion. Long mirrors, mounted with scrolls and wings
+and exquisite carvings, catching and reflecting back the magnificence.
+At their doors merchant-princes dismount from their carriages;
+official dignitaries enter; legislators, tired of making laws, here
+take a respite in breaking them.
+
+From all classes this crime is gathering its victims: the importer of
+foreign silks, and the Chatham street dealer in pocket-handkerchiefs;
+clerks taking a game in the store after the shutters are put up; and
+officers of the court whiling away the time while the jury are out. In
+the woods around Baden Baden, in the morning, it is no rare thing to
+find the suspended bodies of suicides. No splendor of surroundings can
+hide the dreadful nature of this sin. In the third watch of this very
+night, the tears of thousands of orphans and widows will dash up in
+those fountains. The thunders of eternal destruction roll in the deep
+rumble of that ten-pin alley. And as from respectable circles young
+men and old are falling in line of procession, all the drums of woe
+begin to beat the dead march of ten thousand souls.
+
+Seven millions of dollars are annually lost in New York city at the
+gaming-table. Some of your own friends may be at it. The agents of
+these gaming-houses around our hotels are well dressed. They meet a
+stranger in the city; they ask him if he would like to see the city;
+he says, "Yes;" they ask him if he has seen that splendid building up
+town, and he says "No." "Then," says the villain to the greenhorn, "I
+will show you the lions and the elephants." After seeing the lions
+and the elephants, I would not give much for a young man's chance for
+decency or heaven. He looks in, and sees nothing objectionable; but
+let him beware, for he is on enchanted ground. Look out for the men
+who have such sleek hats--always sleek hats--and such a patronizing
+air, and who are so unaccountably interested in your welfare and
+entertainment. All that they want of you is your money. A young man
+on Chestnut street, Philadelphia, lost in a night all his money at the
+gaming-table, and, before he left the table, blew his brains out; but
+before the maid had cleaned up the blood the players were again at the
+table, shuffling away. A wolf has more compassion for the lamb whose
+blood it licks up; a highwayman more love for the belated traveller
+upon whose carcass he piles the stone; the frost more feeling for
+the flower it kills; the fire more tenderness for the tree-branch it
+consumes; the storm more pity for the ship that it shivers on Long
+Island coast, than a gambler's heart has mercy for his victim.
+
+Deed of darkness unfit for sunlight, or early evening hour! Let it
+come forth only when most of the city lights are out, in the third
+watch of the night!
+
+Again, it is after twelve o'clock that drunkenness shows its worst
+deformity! At eight or nine o'clock the low saloons are not so
+ghastly. At nine o'clock the victims are only talkative. At ten
+o'clock they are much flushed. At eleven o'clock their tongue is
+thick, and their hat occasionally falls from the head. At twelve they
+are nauseated and blasphemous, and not able to rise. At one they fall
+to the floor, asking for more drink. At two o'clock, unconscious and
+breathing hard. They would not fly though the house took fire. Soaked,
+imbruted, dead drunk! They are strewn all over the city, in the
+drinking saloons,--fathers, brothers, and sons; men as good as you,
+naturally--perhaps better.
+
+Not so with the higher circles of intoxication. The "gentlemen" coax
+their fellow-reveller to bed, or start with him for home, one at each
+arm, holding him up; the night air is filled with his hooting and
+cursing. He will be helped into his own door. He will fall into the
+entry. Hush it up! Let not the children of the house be awakened to
+hear the shame. He is one of the merchant princes.
+
+But you cannot always hush it up.
+
+Drink makes men mad. One of its victims came home and found that his
+wife had died during his absence; and he went into the room where she
+had been prepared for the grave, and shook her from the shroud, and
+tossed her body out of the window. Where sin is loud and loathsome and
+frenzied, it is hard to keep it still. This whole land is soaked with
+the abomination. It became so bad in Massachusetts, that the State
+arose in indignation; and having appointed agents for the sale of
+alcohol for mechanical and medicinal purposes, prohibited the
+general traffic under a penalty of five hundred dollars. The popular
+proprietors of the Revere, Tremont, and Parker Houses were arrested.
+The grog-shops diminished in number from six thousand to six hundred.
+God grant that the time may speed on when all the cities and States
+shall rouse up, and put their foot upon this abomination.
+
+As you pass along the streets, night by night, you will see the awful
+need that something radical be done. But you do not see the worst.
+That will come to pass long after you are sleeping--in the third watch
+of the night.
+
+Oh! ye who have been longing for fields of work, here they are
+before you. At the London midnight meetings, thirteen thousand of the
+daughters of sin were reformed; and uncounted numbers of men, who were
+drunken and debauched, have been redeemed. If from our highest circles
+a few score of men and women would go forth among the wandering and
+the destitute, they might yet make the darkest alley of the town
+kindle with the gladness of heaven. Do not go in your warm furs, and
+from your well-laden tables, thinking that pious counsel will stop the
+gnawing of empty stomachs or warm their stockingless feet. Take
+food and medicine, and raiment, as well as a prayer. When the city
+missionary told the destitute woman she ought to love God, she said:
+"Ah! if you were as cold and hungry as I am, you could think of
+nothing else."
+
+I am glad to know that not one earnest prayer, not one heartfelt
+alms-giving, not one kind word, ever goes unblessed. Among the
+mountains of Switzerland there is a place where, if your voice be
+uttered, there will come back a score of echoes. But utter a kind,
+sympathetic, and saving word in the dark places of the town, and there
+will come back ten thousand echoes from all the thrones of heaven.
+
+There may be some one reading this who knows by experience of the
+tragedies enacted in the third watch of the night. I am not the man
+to thrust you back with one harsh word. Take off the bandage from your
+soul, and put on it the salve of the Saviour's compassion. There
+is rest in God for your tired soul. Many have come back from their
+wanderings. I see them coming now. Cry up the news to heaven! Set
+all the bells a-ringing! Under the high arch spread the banquet of
+rejoicing. Let all the crowned heads of heaven come in and keep the
+jubilee. I tell you there is more joy in heaven over one man who
+reforms than over ninety-and-nine who never got off the track.
+
+But there is a man who will never return from his evil ways. How many
+acts are there in a tragedy? Five, I believe:
+
+ACT I.--_Young man starting from home. Parents and sisters weeping to
+have him go. Wagon passing over the hills. Farewell kiss thrown back.
+Ring the bell and let the curtain drop_.
+
+ACT II.--_Marriage altar. Bright lights. Full organ. White
+veil trailing through the aisle. Prayer and congratulation, and
+exclamations of "How well she looks!" Ring the bell, and let the
+curtain drop_.
+
+ACT III.--_Midnight. Woman waiting for staggering steps. Old garments
+stuck into the broken window-pane. Many marks of hardship on the face.
+Biting of the nails of bloodless fingers. Neglect, cruelty, disgrace.
+Ring the bell, and let the curtain drop_.
+
+ACT IV.--_Three graves in a very dark place. Grave of child who died
+from lack of medicine. Grave of wife who died of a broken heart. Grave
+of husband and father who died of dissipation. Plenty of weeds, but no
+flowers. O what a blasted heath with three graves! Ring the bell, and
+let the curtain drop_.
+
+ACT V.--_A destroyed soul's eternity. No light; no music; no hope!
+Despair coiling around the heart with unutterable anguish. Blackness
+of darkness forever_.
+
+Woe! Woe! Woe! I cannot bear longer to look. I close my eyes at this
+last act of the tragedy. Quick! Quick! Ring the bell and let the
+curtain drop.
+
+
+
+
+THE INDISCRIMINATE DANCE.
+
+
+It is the anniversary of Herod's birthday. The palace is lighted. The
+highways leading thereto are ablaze with the pomp of invited guests.
+Lords, captains, merchant princes, and the mightiest men of the realm
+are on the way to mingle in the festivities. The tables are filled
+with all the luxuries that the royal purveyors can gather,--spiced
+wines, and fruits, and rare meats. The guests, white-robed, anointed
+and perfumed, take their places. Music! The jests evoke roars of
+laughter. Riddles are propounded. Repartees indulged. Toasts drunk.
+The brain befogged. Wit gives place to uproar and blasphemy. And yet
+they are not satisfied. Turn on more light. Give us more music. Sound
+the trumpet. Clear the floor for the dance. Bring in Salome, the
+graceful and accomplished princess.
+
+The doors are opened and in bounds the dancer. Stand back and give
+plenty of room for the gyrations. The lords are enchanted. They never
+saw such poetry of motion. Their souls whirl in the reel, and bound
+with the bounding feet. Herod forgets crown and throne,--everything
+but the fascinations of Salome. The magnificence of his realm is as
+nothing compared with that which now whirls before him on tiptoe. His
+heart is in transport with Salome as her arms are now tossed in
+the air, and now placed akimbo. He sways with every motion of the
+enchantress. He thrills with the quick pulsations of her feet, and is
+bewitched with the posturing and attitudes that he never saw before,
+in a moment exchanged for others just as amazing. He sits in silence
+before the whirling, bounding, leaping, flashing wonder. And when
+the dance stops, and the tinkling cymbals pause, and the long, loud
+plaudits that shook the palace with their thunders had abated, the
+entranced monarch swears unto the princely performer: "Whatsoever thou
+shalt ask of me I will give it to thee, to the half of my kingdom."
+
+Now there was in prison a minister by the name of John the Baptist,
+who had made much trouble by his honest preaching. He had denounced
+the sins of the king, and brought down upon himself the wrath of the
+females in the royal family. At the instigation of her mother, Salome
+takes advantage of the king's extravagant promise and demands the head
+of John the Baptist on a dinner-plate.
+
+There is a sound of heavy feet, and the clatter of swords outside of
+the palace. Swing back the door. The executioners are returning, from
+their awful errand. They hand a platter to Salome. What is that on the
+platter? A new tankard of wine to rekindle the mirth of the lords? No!
+It is redder than wine, and costlier. It is the ghastly, bleeding head
+of John the Baptist! Its locks dabbled in gore. Its eyes set in the
+death-stare. The distress of the last agony in the features. That
+fascinating form, that just now swayed so gracefully in the dance,
+bends over the horrid burden without a shudder. She gloats over the
+blood; and just as the maid of your household goes, bearing out on a
+tray the empty glasses of the evening's entertainment, so she carried
+out on a platter the dissevered head of that good man, while all the
+banqueters shouted, and thought it a grand joke, that, in such a brief
+and easy way, they had freed themselves from such a plain-spoken,
+troublesome minister.
+
+What could be more innocent than a birthday festival? All the kings
+from the time of Pharaoh had celebrated such days; and why not Herod?
+It was right that the palace should be lighted, and that the cymbals
+should clap, and that the royal guests should go to a banquet; but,
+before the rioting and wassail that closed the scene of that day,
+every pure nature revolts.
+
+Behold the work, the influence, and the end of an infamous dancer!
+
+I am, by natural temperament and religious theory, utterly opposed
+to the position of those who are horrified at every demonstration
+of mirth and playfulness in social life, and who seem to think that
+everything, decent and immortal, depends upon the style in which
+people carry their feet. On the other hand, I can see nothing but
+ruin, moral and physical, in the dissipations of the ball-room, which
+have despoiled thousands of young men and women of all that gives
+dignity to character, or usefulness to life.
+
+Dancing has been styled "the graceful movement of the body adjusted
+by art, to the measures or tune of instruments, or of the voice." All
+nations have danced. The ancients thought that Pollux and Castor at
+first taught the practice to the Lacedaemonians; but, whatever be its
+origin, all climes have adopted it.
+
+In other days there were festal dances, and funeral dances, and
+military dances, and "mediatorial" dances, and bacchanalian dances.
+Queens and lords have swayed to and fro in their gardens; and the
+rough men of the backwoods in this way have roused up the echo of the
+forest. There seems to be something in lively and coherent sounds to
+evoke the movement of hand and foot, whether cultured or uncultured.
+Men passing the street unconsciously keep step to the music of the
+band; and Christians in church unconsciously find themselves keeping
+time with their feet, while their soul is uplifted by some great
+harmony. Not only is this true in cultured life, but the red men of
+Oregon have their scalp dances, and green-corn dances, and war dances.
+It is, therefore, no abstract question that you ask me--Is it right to
+dance?
+
+The ancient fathers, aroused by the indecent dances of those days,
+gave emphatic evidence against any participation in the dance. St.
+Chrysostom says:--"The feet were not given for dancing, but to walk
+modestly; not to leap impudently like camels."
+
+One of the dogmas of the ancient church reads: "A dance is the devil's
+possession; and he that entereth into a dance, entereth into his
+possession. The devil is the gate to the middle and to the end of the
+dance. As many passes as a man makes in dancing, so many passes doth
+he make to hell." Elsewhere, these old dogmas declare--"The woman
+that singeth in the dance is the princess of the devil; and those
+that answer are his clerks; and the beholders are his friends, and
+the music are his bellows, and the fiddlers are the ministers of the
+devil; for, as when hogs are strayed, if the hogs'-herd call one,
+all assemble together, so the devil calleth one woman to sing in the
+dance, or to play on some instrument, and presently all the dancers
+gather together."
+
+This wholesale and indiscriminate denunciation grew out of the utter
+dissoluteness of those ancient plays. So great at one time was the
+offence to all decency, that the Roman Senate decreed the expulsion of
+all dancers and dancing-masters from Rome.
+
+Yet we are not to discuss the customs of that day, but the customs of
+the present. We cannot let the fathers decide the question for us.
+Our reason, enlightened by the Bible, shall be the standard. I am not
+ready to excommunicate all those who lift their feet beyond a certain
+height. I would not visit our youth with a rigor of criticism that
+would put out all their ardor of soul. I do not believe that all the
+inhabitants of Wales, who used to step to the sound of the rustic
+pibcorn, went down to ruin. I would give to all of our youth the right
+to romp and play. God meant it, or he would not have surcharged
+our natures with such exuberance. If a mother join hands with her
+children, and while the eldest strikes the keys, fill all the house
+with the sound of agile feet, I see no harm. If a few friends,
+gathered in happy circle, conclude to cross and recross the room to
+the sound of the piano well played, I see no harm. I for a long while
+tried to see in it a harm, but I never could, and I probably never
+will. I would to God men kept young for a greater length of time.
+Never since my school-boy days have I loved so well as now the
+hilarities of life. What if we have felt heavy burdens, and suffered a
+multitude of hard knocks, is it any reason why we should stand in the
+path of those who, unstung by life's misfortunes, are exhilarated and
+full of glee?
+
+God bless the young! They will have to live many a day if they want to
+hear me say one word to dampen their ardor or clip their wings, or
+to throw a cloud upon their life by telling them that it is hard,
+and dark, and doleful. It is no such thing. You will meet with many a
+trial; but, speaking from my own experience, let me tell you that you
+will be treated a great deal better than you deserve.
+
+Let us not grudge to the young their joy. As we go further on in life,
+let us go with the remembrance that we have had our gleeful days. When
+old age frosts our locks, and stiffens our limbs, let us not block up
+the way, but say, "We had our good times: now let others have theirs."
+As our children come on, let us cheerfully give them our places. How
+glad will I be to let them have everything,--my house, my books, my
+place in society, my heritage! By the time we get old we will have had
+our way long enough. Then let our children come on and we'll have it
+their way. For thirty, forty, or fifty years, we have been drinking
+from the cup of life; and we ought not to complain if called to pass
+the cup along and let others take a drink.
+
+But, while we have a right to the enjoyments of life, we never will
+countenance sinful indulgences. I here set forth a group of what
+might be called the dissipations of the ball-room. They swing an awful
+scythe of death. Are we to stand idly by, and let the work go on, lest
+in the rebuke we tread upon the long trail of some popular vanity? The
+whirlpool of the ball-room drags down the life, the beauty, and the
+moral worth of the city. In this whirlwind of imported silks goes out
+the life of many of our best families. Bodies and souls innumerable
+are annually consumed in this conflagration of ribbons.
+
+This style of dissipation is the abettor of pride, the instigator of
+jealousy, the sacrificial altar of health, the defiler of the soul,
+the avenue of lust, and the curse of the town. The tread of this wild,
+intoxicating, heated midnight dance jars all the moral hearthstones of
+the city. The physical ruin is evident. What will become of those
+who work all day and dance all night? A few years will turn them out
+nervous, exhausted imbeciles. Those who have given up their midnights
+to spiced wines, and hot suppers, and ride home through winter's cold,
+unwrapped from the elements, will at last be recorded suicides.
+
+There is but a short step from the ball-room to the grave-yard. There
+are consumptions and fierce neuralgias close on the track. Amid that
+glittering maze of ball-room splendors, diseases stand right and left,
+and balance and chain. A sepulchral breath floats up amid the perfume,
+and the froth of death's lip bubbles up in the champagne.
+
+Many of our brightest homes are being sacrificed. There are families
+that have actually quit keeping house, and gone to boarding, that
+they may give themselves more exclusively to the higher duties of
+the ball-room. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, finding
+their highest enjoyment in the dance, bid farewell to books, to quiet
+culture, to all the amenities of home. The father will, after a while,
+go down into lower dissipations. The son will be tossed about
+in society, a nonentity. The daughter will elope with a French
+dancing-master. The mother, still trying to stay in the glitter,
+and by every art attempting to keep the color in her cheek, and the
+wrinkles off her brow, attempting, without any success, all the arts
+of the belle,--an old flirt, a poor, miserable butterfly without any
+wings.
+
+If anything on the earth is beautiful to my eye, it is an aged woman;
+her hair floating back over the wrinkled brow, not frosted, but white
+with the blossoms of the tree of life; her voice tender with
+past memories, and her face a benediction. The children pull at
+grandmother's dress as she passes through the room, and almost pull
+her down in her weakness; yet she has nothing but a cake, or a candy,
+or a kind word for the little darlings. When she goes away from us
+there is a shadow on the table, a shadow on the hearth, and a shadow
+in the dwelling.
+
+But if anything on earth is distressful to look at, it is an old woman
+ashamed of being old. What with paint and false hair, she is too much
+for my gravity. I laugh, even in church, when I see her coming. One of
+the worst looking birds I know of is a peacock after it has lost its
+feathers. I would not give one lock of my mother's gray hair for fifty
+thousand such caricatures of old age. The first time you find these
+faithful disciples of the ball-room diligently engaged and happy in
+the duties of the home circle, send me word, for I would go a great
+way to see such a phenomenon. These creatures have no home. Their
+children unwashed. Their furniture undusted. Their china closets
+disordered. The house a scene of confusion, misrule, cheerlessness,
+and dirt. One would think you might discover even amid the witcheries
+of the ball-room the sickening odors of the unswept, unventilated, and
+unclean domestic apartments.
+
+These dissipations extinguish all love of usefulness. How could you
+expect one to be interested in the alleviations of the world's misery,
+while there is a question to be decided about the size of a glove
+or the shade of a pongee? How many of these men and women of the
+ball-room visit the poor, or help dress the wounds of a returned
+soldier in the hospital? When did the world ever see a perpetual
+dancer distributing tracts? Such persons are turned in upon
+themselves. And it is very poor pasture!
+
+This gilded sphere is utterly bedwarfing to intellect and soul. This
+constant study of little things; this harassing anxiety about
+dress; this talk of fashionable infinitesimals; this shoe-pinched,
+hair-frizzled, fringe-spattered group--that simper and look askance
+at the mirrors and wonder, with infinity of interest, "how that one
+geranium leaf does look;" this shrivelling up of man's moral dignity,
+until it is no more observable with the naked eye; this taking of a
+woman's heart, that God meant should be filled with all amenities,
+and compressing it until all the fragrance, and simplicity, and
+artlessness are squeezed out of it; this inquisition of a small shoe;
+this agony of tight lacing; this wrapping up of mind and heart in
+a ruffle; this tumbling down of a soul that God meant for great
+upliftings!
+
+I prophesy the spiritual ruin of all participators in this rivalry.
+Have the white, polished, glistening boards ever been the road to
+heaven? Who at the flash of those chandeliers hath kindled a torch
+for eternity? From the table spread at the close of that excited and
+besweated scene, who went home to say his prayers?
+
+To many, alas! this life is a masquerade ball. As, at such
+entertainments, gentlemen and ladies appear in the dress of kings
+or queens, mountain bandits or clowns, and at the close of the dance
+throw off their disguises, so, in this dissipated life, all unclean
+passions move in mask. Across the floor they trip merrily. The lights
+sparkle along the wall, or drop from the ceiling--a very cohort of
+fire! The music charms. The diamonds glitter. The feet bound. Gemmed
+hands, stretched out, clasp gemmed hands. Dancing feet respond to
+dancing feet. Gleaming brow bends low to gleaming brow. On with the
+dance! Flash, and rustle, and laughter, and immeasurable merry-making!
+But the languor of death comes over the limbs, and blurs the sight.
+_Lights lower!_ Floor hollow with sepulchral echo. Music saddens into
+a wail. _Lights lower!_ The maskers can hardly now be seen. Flowers
+exchange their fragrance for a sickening odor, such as comes from
+garlands that have lain in vaults of cemeteries. _Lights lower!_ Mists
+fill the room. Glasses rattle as though shaken by sullen thunder.
+Sighs seem caught among the curtains. Scarf falls from the shoulder of
+beauty,--a shroud! _Lights lower!_ Over the slippery boards, in dance
+of death, glide jealousies, disappointments, lust, despair. Torn
+leaves and withered garlands only half hide the ulcered feet.
+The stench of smoking lamp-wicks almost quenched. Choking damps.
+Chilliness. Feet still. Hands folded. Eyes shut. Voices hushed.
+
+LIGHTS OUT!
+
+
+
+
+THE MASSACRE BY NEEDLE AND SEWING-MACHINE.
+
+
+Very long ago the needle was busy. It was considered honorable for
+women to toil in olden time. Alexander the Great stood in his palace
+showing garments made by his own mother. The finest tapestries at
+Bayeux were made by the Queen of William the Conqueror. Augustus the
+Emperor would not wear any garments except those that were fashioned
+by some member of his royal family. So let the toiler everywhere be
+respected!
+
+The greatest blessing that could have happened to our first parents
+was being turned out of Eden after they had done wrong. Adam and Eve,
+in their perfect state, might have got along without work, or only
+such slight employment as a perfect garden, with no weeds in it,
+demanded. But, as soon as they had sinned, the best thing for them
+was to be turned out where they would have to work. We know what a
+withering thing it is for a man to have nothing to do. Old Ashbel
+Green, at fourscore years, when asked why he kept on working, said,
+"I do so to keep out of mischief." We see that a man who has a
+large amount of money to start with has no chance. Of the thousand
+prosperous and honorable men that you know, nine hundred and
+ninety-nine had to work vigorously at the beginning.
+
+But I am now to tell you that industry is just as important for
+a woman's safety and happiness. The most unhappy women in our
+communities to-day are those who have no engagements to call them up
+in the morning; who, once having risen and breakfasted, lounge through
+the dull forenoon in slippers down at the heel and with dishevelled
+hair, reading George Sand's last novel; and who, having dragged
+through a wretched forenoon and taken their afternoon sleep, and
+having spent an hour and a half at their toilet, pick up their
+card-case and go out to make calls; and who pass their evenings
+waiting for somebody to come in and break up the monotony. Arabella
+Stuart never was imprisoned in so dark a dungeon as that.
+
+There is no happiness in an idle woman. It may be with hand, it may
+be with brain, it may be with foot; but work she must, or be wretched
+forever. The little girls of our families must be started with that
+idea. The curse of our American society is that our young women are
+taught that the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh,
+tenth, fiftieth, thousandth thing in their life is to get somebody to
+take care of them. Instead of that, the first lesson should be, how,
+under God, they may take care of themselves. The simple fact is that
+a majority of them do have to take care of themselves, and that, too,
+after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the
+years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain
+themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and
+outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into
+womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood.
+Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of,
+but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of
+which I could make a livelihood."
+
+You say you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you
+not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches
+have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving
+a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in
+a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an
+oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the
+church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in
+Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money
+cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed
+that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the
+most orthodox and heavenly style.
+
+O the damnable schemes that professed Christians will engage in--until
+God puts his fingers into the collar of the hypocrite's robe and rips
+it clear down to the bottom!
+
+You have no right, because you are well off, to conclude that your
+children are going to be as well off. A man died, leaving a large
+fortune. His son, a few months ago, fell dead in a Philadelphia
+grog-shop. His old comrades came in and said, as they bent over his
+corpse: "What is the matter with you, Boggsey?" The surgeon standing
+over him said: "Hush up! he is dead!"--"Ah, he is dead!" they said.
+"Come, boys, let us go and take a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!"
+
+Have you nothing better than money to leave your children? If you
+have not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and
+unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide,
+infanticide--compared with which that of poor Hester Vaughan was
+innocence. There are women toiling in our cities for three and four
+dollars per week, who were the daughters of merchant princes. These
+suffering ones now would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell
+from their father's table. That worn-out, broken shoe that she wears
+is the lineal descendant of the twelve-dollar gaiters in which
+her mother walked; and that torn and faded calico had ancestry of
+magnificent brocade, that swept Broadway clean without any expense to
+the street commissioners. Though you live in an elegant residence, and
+fare sumptuously every day, let your daughters feel it is a disgrace
+to them not to know how to work. I denounce the idea, prevalent in
+society, that though our young women may embroider slippers, and
+crochet, and make mats for lamps to stand on, without disgrace, the
+idea of doing anything for a livelihood is dishonorable. It is a shame
+for a young woman, belonging to a large family, to be inefficient when
+the father toils his life away for her support. It is a shame for a
+daughter to be idle while her mother toils at the wash-tub. It is as
+honorable to sweep house, make beds, or trim hats, as it is to twist a
+watch-chain.
+
+As far as I can understand, the line of respectability lies between
+that which is useful and that which is useless. If women do that which
+is of no value, their work is honorable. If they do practical work, it
+is dishonorable. That our young women may escape the censure of doing
+dishonorable work, I shall particularize. You may knit a tidy for the
+back of an armchair, but by no means make the money wherewith to buy
+the chair. You may, with delicate brush, beautify a mantel-ornament,
+but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble mantel. You may
+learn artistic music until you can squall Italian, but never sing
+"Ortonville" or "Old Hundred." Do nothing practical, if you would, in
+the eyes of refined society, preserve your respectability.
+
+I scout these finical notions. I tell you a woman, no more than a man,
+has a right to occupy a place in this world unless she pays a rent for
+it.
+
+In the course of a lifetime you consume whole harvests, and droves of
+cattle, and every day you live breathe forty hogsheads of good pure
+air. You must, by some kind of usefulness, _pay_ for all this. Our
+race was the last thing created,--the birds and fishes on the fourth
+day, the cattle and lizards on the fifth day, and man on the sixth
+day. If geologists are right, the earth was a million of years in the
+possession of the insects, beasts, and birds, before our race came
+upon it. In one sense, we were innovators. The cattle, the lizards,
+and the hawks had pre-emption right. The question is not what we are
+to do with the lizards and summer insects, but what the lizards and
+summer insects are to do with us.
+
+If we want a place in this world we must _earn_ it. The partridge
+makes its own nest before it occupies it. The lark, by its morning
+song, earns its breakfast before it eats it; and the Bible gives an
+intimation that the first duty of an idler is to starve, when it
+says if he "will not work, neither shall he eat." Idleness ruins the
+health; and very soon Nature says, "This man has refused to pay his
+rent; out with him!"
+
+Society is to be reconstructed on the subject of woman's toil. A vast
+majority of those who would have woman industrious shut her up to a
+few kinds of work. My judgment in this matter is, that a woman has a
+right to do anything she can do well. There should be no department
+of merchandise, mechanism, art, or science barred against her. If Miss
+Hosmer has genius for sculpture, give her a chisel. If Rosa Bonheur
+has a fondness for delineating animals, let her make "The Horse
+Fair." If Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry
+ladder. If Lydia will be a merchant, let her sell purple. If Lucretia
+Mott will preach the Gospel, let her thrill with her womanly eloquence
+the Quaker meeting-house.
+
+It is said, if woman is given such opportunities, she will occupy
+places that might be taken by men. I say, if she have more skill and
+adaptedness for any position than a man has, let her have it! She has
+as much right to her bread, to her apparel, and to her home, as men
+have.
+
+But it is said that her nature is so delicate that she is unfitted for
+exhausting toil. I ask, in the name of all past history, what toil on
+earth is more severe, exhausting, and tremendous than that toil of the
+needle to which for ages she has been subjected? The battering-ram,
+the sword, the carbine, the battle-axe have made no such havoc as the
+needle. I would that these living sepulchres in which women have for
+ages been buried might be opened, and that some resurrection trumpet
+might bring up these living corpses to the fresh air and sunlight.
+
+Go with me, and I will show you a woman who, by hardest toil, supports
+her children, her drunken husband, her old father and mother, pays her
+house-rent, always has wholesome food on her table, and, when she
+can get some neighbor on the Sabbath to come in and take care of
+her family, appears in church, with hat and cloak that are far from
+indicating the toil to which she is subjected.
+
+Such a woman as that has body and soul enough to fit her for _any_
+position. She could stand beside the majority of your salesmen and
+dispose of more goods. She could go into your wheelwright shops and
+beat one-half of your workmen at making carriages. We talk about woman
+as though we had resigned to her all the light work, and ourselves had
+shouldered the heavier. But the day of judgment, which will reveal
+the sufferings of the stake and inquisition, will marshal before the
+throne of God and the hierarchs of heaven the martyrs of wash-tub and
+needle.
+
+Now, I say, if there be any preference in occupation, let woman have
+it. God knows her trials are the severest. By her acuter sensitiveness
+to misfortune, by her hour of anguish, I demand that no one hedge up
+her pathway to a livelihood. O the meanness, the despicability of
+men who begrudge a woman the right to work anywhere, in any honorable
+calling!
+
+I go still further, and say that women should have equal compensation
+with men. By what principle of justice is it that women in many of our
+cities get only two-thirds as much pay as men, and in many cases only
+half? Here is the gigantic injustice--that for work equally well, if
+not better done, woman receives far less compensation than man. Start
+with the National Government: women clerks in Washington get nine
+hundred dollars for doing that for which men receive eighteen hundred.
+
+To thousands of young women of New York to-day there is only this
+alternative: starvation or dishonor. Many of the largest mercantile
+establishments of our cities are accessory to these abominations;
+and from their large establishments there are scores of souls being
+pitched off into death; _and their employers know it!_
+
+Is there a God? Will there be a judgment? I tell you, if God rises up
+to redress woman's wrongs, many of our large establishments will be
+swallowed up quicker than a South-American earthquake ever took down
+a city. God will catch these oppressors between the two mill-stones of
+his wrath, and grind them to powder!
+
+Why is it that a female principal in a school gets only eight hundred
+and twenty-five dollars for doing work for which a male principal gets
+sixteen hundred and fifty?
+
+I hear from all this land the wail of woman-hood. Man has nothing to
+answer to that wail but flatteries. He says she is an angel. She is
+not. She knows she is not. She is a human being, who gets hungry
+when she has no food, and cold when she has no fire. Give her no more
+flatteries: give her _justice!_
+
+There are thirty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and Brooklyn.
+Across the darkness of this night I hear their death-groan. It is not
+such a cry as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of life,
+but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting away. Gather them before you
+and look into their faces, pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck! Look at
+their fingers, needle-picked and blood-tipped! See that premature
+stoop in the shoulders! Hear that dry, hacking, merciless cough!
+
+At a large meeting of these women, held in a hall in Philadelphia,
+grand speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the stand,
+threw aside her faded shawl, and, with her shrivelled arm, hurled a
+very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking out of the horrors of her own
+experience.
+
+Stand at the corner of a street in New York at half-past five or six
+o'clock in the morning, as the women go to their work. Many of them
+had no breakfast except the crumbs that were left over from the night
+before, or a crust they chew on their way through the street. Here
+they come! the working girls of New York and Brooklyn! These engaged
+in bead-work, these in flower-making, in millinery, enamelling, cigar
+making, book-binding, labelling, feather-picking, print-coloring,
+paper-box making, but, most overworked of all, and least compensated,
+the sewing-women. Why do they not take the city-cars on their way
+up? They cannot afford the five cents! If, concluding to deny herself
+something else, she get into the car, give her a seat! You want to see
+how Latimer and Ridley appeared in the fire: look at that woman and
+behold a more horrible martyrdom, a hotter fire, a more agonizing
+death! Ask that woman how much she gets for her work, and she will
+tell you six cents for making coarse shirts, and finds her own thread!
+
+Last Sabbath night, in the vestibule of my church, after service, a
+woman fell in convulsions. The doctor said she needed medicine not so
+much as something to eat. As she began to revive in her delirium,
+she said, gaspingly: "Eight cents! Eight cents! Eight cents! I wish I
+could get it done! I am so tired! I wish I could get some sleep, but I
+must get it done! Eight cents! Eight cents!" We found afterwards that
+she was making garments for eight cents apiece, and that she could
+make but three of them in a day! Hear it! Three times eight are
+twenty-four! Hear it, men and women who have comfortable homes!
+
+Some of the worst villains of the city are the employers of these
+women. They beat them down to the last penny, and try to cheat them
+out of that. The woman must deposit a dollar or two before she
+gets the garments to work on. When the work is done it is sharply
+inspected, the most insignificant flaws picked out, and the wages
+refused, and sometimes the dollar deposited not given back. The
+Women's Protective Union reports a case where one of these poor souls,
+finding a place where she could get more wages, resolved to change
+employers, and went to get her pay for work done. The employer says:
+"I hear you are going to leave me?"--"Yes," she said, "and I have come
+to get what you owe me." He made no answer. She said: "Are you not
+going to pay me?"--"Yes," he said, "I will pay you;" and _he kicked
+her down the stairs_.
+
+How are these evils to be eradicated? What have you to answer, you
+who sell coats, and have shoes made, and contract for the Southern and
+Western markets? What help is there, what panacea, what redemption?
+Some say: "Give women the ballot." What effect such ballot might have
+on other questions I am not here to discuss; but what would be the
+effect of female suffrage upon woman's wages? I do not believe that
+woman will ever get justice by woman's ballot.
+
+Indeed, women oppress women as much as men do. Do not women, as much
+as men, beat down to the lowest figure the woman who sews for them?
+Are not women as sharp as men on washerwomen, and milliners, and
+mantua-makers? If a woman asks a dollar for her work, does not her
+female employer ask her if she will not take ninety cents? You say
+"only ten cents difference;" but that is sometimes the difference
+between heaven and hell. Women often have less commiseration for women
+than men. If a woman steps aside from the path of virtue, man may
+forgive,--woman never! Woman will never get justice done her from
+woman's ballot.
+
+Neither will she get it from man's ballot. How, then? God will rise
+up for her. God has more resources than we know of. The flaming sword
+that hung at Eden's gate when woman was driven out will cleave with
+its terrible edge her oppressors.
+
+But there is something for our women to do. Let our young people
+prepare to excel in spheres of work, and they will be able, after
+a while, to get larger wages. If it be shown that a woman can, in a
+store, sell more goods in a year than a man, she will soon be able
+not only to ask but to _demand_ more wages, and to demand them
+successfully. Unskilled and incompetent labor must take what is given;
+skilled and competent labor will eventually make its own standard.
+Admitting that the law of supply and demand regulates these things,
+I contend that the demand for skilled labor is very great, and the
+supply very small.
+
+Start with the idea that work is _honorable_, and that you can do some
+one thing better than any one else. Resolve that, God helping, you
+will take care of yourself. If you are, after a while, called into
+another relation, you will all the better be qualified for it by your
+spirit of self-reliance; or if you are called to stay as you are, you
+can be happy and self-supporting.
+
+Poets are fond of talking about man as an oak, and woman the vine that
+climbs it; but I have seen many a tree fall that not only went down
+itself, but took all the vines with it. I can tell you of something
+stronger than an oak for an ivy to climb on, and that is the throne of
+the great Jehovah. Single or affianced, that woman is strong who leans
+on God and does her best. The needle may break; the factory-band may
+slip; the wages may fail; but, over every good woman's head there are
+spread the two great, gentle, stupendous wings of the Almighty.
+
+Many of you will go single-handed through life, and you will have to
+choose between two characters. Young woman, I am sure you will turn
+your back upon the useless, giggling, painted nonentity which society
+ignominiously acknowledges to be a woman, and ask God to make you an
+humble, active, earnest Christian.
+
+What will become of this godless disciple of fashion? What an insult
+to her sex! Her manners are an outrage upon decency. She is more
+thoughtful of the attitude she strikes upon the carpet than how she
+will look in the judgment; more worried about her freckles than her
+sins; more interested in her bonnet-strings than in her redemption.
+Her apparel is the poorest part of a Christian woman, however
+magnificently dressed, and no one has so much right to dress well as
+a Christian. Not so with the godless disciple of fashion. Take her
+robes, and you take everything. Death will come down on her some day,
+and rub the bistre off her eyelids, and the rouge off her cheeks, and
+with two rough, bony hands, scatter spangles and glass beads and rings
+and ribbons and lace and brooches and buckles and sashes and frisettes
+and golden clasps.
+
+The dying actress whose life had been vicious said: "The scene closes.
+Draw the curtain." Generally the tragedy comes first, and the farce
+afterward; but in her life it was first the farce of a useless life,
+and then the tragedy of a wretched eternity.
+
+Compare the life and death of such an one with that of some Christian
+aunt that was once a blessing to your household. I do not know that
+she was ever offered the hand in marriage. She lived single, that
+untrammelled she might be everybody's blessing. Whenever the sick were
+to be visited, or the poor to be provided with bread, she went with a
+blessing. She could pray, or sing "Rock of Ages," for any sick pauper
+who asked her. As she got older, there were days when she was a little
+sharp, but for the most part Auntie was a sunbeam--just the one for
+Christmas-eve. She knew better than any one else how to fix things.
+Her every prayer, as God heard it, was full of everybody who had
+trouble. The brightest things in all the house dropped from her
+fingers. She had peculiar notions, but the grandest notion she ever
+had was to make you happy. She dressed well--Auntie always dressed
+well; but her highest adornment was that of a meek and quiet spirit,
+which, in the sight of God, is of great price. When she died, you all
+gathered lovingly about her; and as you carried her out to rest, the
+Sunday-school class almost covered the coffin with japonicas; and the
+poor people stood at the end of the alley, with their aprons to their
+eyes, sobbing bitterly; and the man of the world said, with Solomon,
+"Her price was above rubies;" and Jesus, as unto the maiden in Judea,
+commanded: "I SAY UNTO THEE, ARISE!"
+
+
+
+
+PICTURES IN THE STOCK GALLERY.
+
+
+[NOTE.--This chapter, though largely devoted to "Oil," is to be
+construed as reaching any other "Kite" that the stock gambler
+flies--any other scheme which his unprincipled ideas of right and
+wrong will permit him to work to his own gain and others' loss.
+The oil mania was only a more popular or attractive _vice_ of the
+stock-boards, which is reproduced, in spirit and motive, almost every
+month of the year.]
+
+At my entrance upon this discussion, I must deplore the indiscriminate
+terms of condemnation employed by many well-meaning persons in regard
+to stock operations. The business of the stock-broker is just as
+legitimate and necessary as that of a dealer in clothes, groceries, or
+hardware; and a man may be as pure-minded and holy a Christian at the
+Board of Brokers as in a prayer-meeting. The broker is, in the sight
+of God, as much entitled to his commissions as any hard-working
+mechanic is entitled to his day's wages. Any man has as much right
+to make money by the going up of stocks as by the going up of sugar,
+rice, or tea. The inevitable board-book that the operator carries in
+his hand may be as pure as the clothing merchant's ledger. It is
+the work of the brokers to facilitate business; to make transfer of
+investment; to watch and report the tides of business; to assist the
+merchant in lawful enterprises.
+
+Because there are men in this department of business, sharp,
+deceitful, and totally iniquitous, you have no right to denounce the
+entire class. Importers, shoe-dealers, lumbermen, do not want to be
+held responsible for the moral deficits of their comrades in business.
+Neither have you a right to excoriate those who are conscientiously
+operating through the channels spoken of. If they take a risk, so do
+all business men. The merchant who buys silk at five dollars per yard
+takes his chances; he expects it to go up to six dollars; it may fall
+to four dollars. If a man, by straightforward operations in stocks,
+meets with disaster and fails, he deserves sympathy just as much as he
+who sold spices or calicoes, and through some miscalculation is struck
+down bankrupt.
+
+We have no right to impose restrictions upon this class of men that
+we impose upon no other. What right have you to denounce the operation
+"buyer--ten days" or "buyer--twenty days," when you take a house,
+"buyer--three hundred and sixty-five days?" Perhaps the entire payment
+is to be made at the end of a year, when you do not know but that, by
+that time, you will be penniless. Give all men their due, if you would
+hold beneficent influence over them. Do not be too rough in pulling
+out the weeds, lest you uproot also the marigolds and verbenas. In
+the Board of Brokers there are some of the most conscientious,
+upright Christian men of our cities--men who would scorn a lie, or a
+subterfuge. Indeed, there are men in these boards who might, in some
+respects, teach a lesson of morality to other commercial circles.
+
+I will not deny that there are special temptations connected with this
+business even when carried on legitimately. So there are dangers to
+the engineer on a railroad. He does not know what night he may dash
+into the coal-train. But engines must be run, and stocks must be sold.
+A nervous, excitable man ought to be very slow to undertake either the
+engine or the Stock Exchange.
+
+A clever young man, of twenty-five years of age, bought ten shares in
+the Pennsylvania Central Railroad. The stock went up five dollars per
+share, and he made fifty dollars by the operation. His mother,
+knowing his temperament, said to him, "I wish you had lost it." But,
+encouraged, he entered another operation, and took ten shares in
+another railroad and made two hundred dollars. By this time he was
+ready for the wildest scheme. He lost, in three years, forty thousand
+dollars, ruined his health, and broke his wife's heart. Her father
+supports them chiefly now. The unfortunate has a shingle up, in a
+small court, among low operators. Such a man as this is unfit for this
+commercial sphere. He would have been unfit for a pilot, unfit for
+military command, unfit for any place that demands steady nerve, cool
+brain, and well-balanced temperament.
+
+But, while there is a legitimate sphere for the broker and operator,
+there are transactions every day undertaken in our cities that can
+only be characterized as superb outrage and villany; and there are
+members of Christian churches who have been guilty of speculations
+that, in the last day, will blanch their cheek, and thunder them
+down to everlasting companionship with the lowest gamblers that ever
+pitched pennies for a drink.
+
+It is not necessary that I should draw the difficult line between
+honorable and dishonorable speculation. God has drawn it through every
+man's conscience. The broker guilty of "cornering" as well knows that
+he is sinning against God and man, as though the flame of Mount Sinai
+singed his eyebrows. He hears that a brother broker has sold "short,"
+and immediately goes about with a wise look, saying: "Erie is going
+down--Erie is going down; prepare for it." Immediately the people
+begin to sell; he buys up the stock; monopolizes the whole affair;
+drags down the man who sold short; makes largely, pockets the gain,
+and thanks the Lord for great prosperity in business. You call it
+"cornering." I call it gambling, theft, highway robbery, villany
+accursed.
+
+It is astonishing how some men, who are kind in their families, useful
+in the church, charitable to the poor, are utterly transformed of the
+devil as soon as they enter the Stock Exchange. A respectable member
+of one of the churches of the city went into a broker's office and
+said: "Get me one hundred shares of Reading, and carry it; I will
+leave a margin of five hundred dollars." Instead of going up,
+according to anticipation, the stock fell. Every few days the operator
+called to ask the broker what success. The stock still declined. The
+operator was so terribly excited that the broker asked him what was
+the matter. He replied: "To tell you the truth, I borrowed that five
+hundred dollars that I lost, and, in anticipation of what I was sure I
+was going to get by the operation, I made a very large subscription to
+the Missionary Society."
+
+The nation has become so accustomed to frauds that no astonishment is
+excited thereby. The public conscience has for many years been utterly
+debauched by what were called fancy stocks, morus multicaulis, Western
+city enterprises, and New England developments.
+
+If a man find on his farm something as large as the head of a pin,
+that, in a strong sunlight, sparkles a little, a gold company is
+formed; books are opened; working capital declared; a select number
+go in on the "ground floor;" and the estates of widows and orphans
+are swept into the vortex. Very little discredit is connected with any
+such transaction, if it is only on a large scale. We cannot bear small
+and insignificant dishonesties, but take off our hats and bow almost
+to the ground in the presence of the man who has made one hundred
+thousand dollars by one swindle. A woman was arrested in the streets
+of one of our cities for selling molasses candy on Sunday. She was
+tried, condemned, and imprisoned. Coming out of prison, she went into
+the same business and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Again she was
+arrested, condemned, and imprisoned. On coming out--showing the total
+depravity of a woman's heart--she again went into the same business,
+and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Whereupon the police, the mayor and
+the public sentiment of the city rose up and declared that, though
+the heavens fell, no woman should be allowed to sell molasses candy on
+Sunday. Yet the law puts its hands behind its back, and walks up and
+down in the presence of a thousand abominations and dares not whisper.
+
+There are scores of men to-day on the streets, whose costly family
+wardrobes, whose rosewood furniture, whose splendid turn-outs, whose
+stately mansions, are made out of the distresses of sewing-women,
+whose money they gathered up in a stock swindle. There is human sweat
+in the golden tankards. There is human blood in the crimson plush.
+There are the bones of unrequited toil in the pearly keys of the
+piano. There is the curse of an incensed God hovering over all their
+magnificence. Some night the man will not be able to rest. He will
+rise up in bewilderment and look about him, crying: "Who is there?"
+Those whom he has wronged will thrust their skinny arms under the
+tapestry, and touch his brow, and feel for his heart, and blow their
+sepulchral breath into his face, crying: "Come to judgment!"
+
+For the warning of young men, I shall specify but two of the world's
+most gigantic swindles--one English, and the other American.
+In England, in the early part of the last century, reports were
+circulated of the fabulous wealth of South America. A company was
+formed, with a stock of what would be equal to thirty millions of our
+dollars. The government guaranteed to the company the control of all
+the trade to the South Sea, and the company was to assume the entire
+debt of England, then amounting to one hundred and forty millions of
+dollars. Magnificent project! The English nation talked and dreamed
+of nothing but Peruvian gold and Mexican silver, the national debt
+liquidated, and Eldorados numberless and illimitable! When five
+million pounds of new stock was offered at three hundred pounds per
+share, it was all snatched up with avidity. Thirty million dollars
+of the stock was subscribed for, when there were but five millions
+offered. South Sea went up, until in the midsummer month the stock
+stood at one thousand per cent. The whole nation was intoxicated.
+Around about this scheme, as might have been expected, others just as
+wild arose. A company was formed with ten million dollars of capital
+for importing walnut trees from Virginia. A company for developing
+a wheel to go by perpetual motion, with a capital of four million
+dollars. A company for developing a new kind of soap. A company for
+insuring against losses by servants, with fifteen million dollars
+capital. One scheme was entitled: "A company for carrying on an
+undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is--capital
+two million five hundred thousand dollars, in shares of five hundred
+each. Further information to be given in a month."
+
+The books were opened at nine o'clock in the morning. Before night
+a thousand shares were taken, and two thousand pounds paid in. So
+successful was the day's work, that that night the projector of the
+enterprise went out of the business, and forever vanished from the
+public. But it was not a perfect loss. The subscribers had their
+ornamented certificates of stock to comfort them. Hunt's Merchant's
+Magazine, speaking of those times, says "that from morning until
+evening 'Change Alley was filled to overflowing with one dense mass of
+living beings composed of the most incongruous materials, and, in
+all things save the mad pursuit in which they were employed, the very
+opposite in habits and conditions."
+
+What was the end of this chapter of English enterprise? Suddenly
+the ruin came. Down went the whole nation--members of Parliament,
+tradesmen, physicians, clergymen, lawyers, royal ladies, and poor
+needle-women--in one stupendous calamity. The whole earth, and all the
+ages, heard that bubble burst.
+
+But I am not through. Our young men shall hear more startling things.
+We surpass England in having higher mountains, deeper rivers, greater
+cataracts, and larger armies. Yea, we have surpassed it in magnitude
+of swindles. I wish to unfold before the young men of the country,
+and before those in whose hands may now be the price of blood, the
+wide-spread, ghastly, and almost infinitely greater wickedness of the
+gamblers in oil stock. Now, the obtaining of lands, the transporting
+of machinery, and the forming of companies for the production of oil,
+is just as honorable as any organization for the obtaining of coal,
+iron, copper, or zinc. God poured out before this nation a river of
+oil, and intended us to gather it up, transport it, and use it;
+and there were companies formed that have withstood all commercial
+changes, and continued, year after year, in the prosecution of an
+honorable business. I have just as much respect for the man who has
+made fifty thousand dollars by oil as I have for him who has made it
+by spices.
+
+Out of twelve hundred petroleum companies, how many do you suppose
+were honestly formed and rightfully conducted? Do you say six hundred?
+You make large demands upon one's credulity; but let us be generous,
+and suppose that six hundred companies bought land, issued honest
+circulars, sent out machinery, and plunged into the earth for the
+rightful development of resources. To form the other six hundred
+companies, only three or four things were necessary: First, an
+attractive circular, regardless of expense. It must have all the
+colors and hues of earth, and sea, and heaven. Let the letters flame
+with all the beauty of gold, and jasper, and amethyst. It must state
+the date of incorporation, and the fact that "all subscribers shall
+get the benefit of the original undertaking. While it does not make
+so much pretension as some other companies, it must be distinctly
+announced that this is a safe and permanent investment." The circular
+must state that "there are a goodly number of flowing wells, and
+others which the company are happy to say have a very good smell of
+oil." "The books will be open only five days, as there are only a few
+shares yet to be taken." Connected with this circular is an elaborate
+map, drawn by the artist of the company. Never mind the geography of
+the country. Our map must have a creek running through it, so crooked
+as to traverse as much of the land as possible, and make it all
+water-front. "Ah!" said one man to his artist, "you make only one
+creek."--"Well," said the artist, "if you want three creeks you can
+have them at very little expense. There--you have them now--three
+creeks!"
+
+Then the circular must have good names attached to it. How to get
+them? The president and directors must be prominent men. If celebrated
+for piety, all the better. The estimable man approached says: "I know
+nothing about this company."--"Well," says the committee waiting
+on him, "we will give you five hundred dollars' worth of shares."
+Immediately the estimable man begins to "know about it," and accepts
+the position of president. Three or four directors are obtained in
+the same way. Now the thing is easy. After this you can get anybody.
+Ordinary Christians and sinners feel it a joy to be in such celebrated
+society.
+
+Another thing important is that the company purchase three or four
+vials of oil to stand in the window--some in the crude state, the rest
+clarified. Genuine specimens from Venango County.
+
+Another important thing: there must be a large working capital,
+for the company do not mean to be idle. They have derricks already
+building; and there will be large monthly dividends. Let it be known
+that there were companies in some cities who, claiming to have
+a capital of four hundred thousand dollars, yet had that capital
+exhausted when they had sunk one well costing five thousand dollars.
+But never mind. The thing must be right, for some of the directors
+are eminent for respectability. You say it is certainly important that
+there be some land out of which the oil is to be obtained. Oh! no. Why
+be troubled with any land at all? It is an expense for nothing. You
+have the circular, and the glowing map, with the creeks and three
+vials of oil in the window, and a flaming advertisement in the
+newspapers. Now let the books be opened! Better if you can have a
+half-dozen offices in one room; then the agent can accommodate you
+with anything you desire. If you want to take a "flyer" in this and a
+"flyer" in that, you shall have it.
+
+Coming in from the country are farmers, dairymen, day-laborers. Great
+chances now for speedy emoluments. Pour in the hard-earned treasures.
+Sure enough, a dividend of one per cent. per month! Forthwith, another
+multitude are convinced of the safety of the investment. The second
+month another dividend. The third month another. Whence do these
+dividends come? From the product of the wells? Oh! no. It is your own
+money they are paying you back. How generous of this company to give
+you five dollars back, when you might have lost it all!
+
+But the dividends stop. What is the matter? Instead of the
+advertisement which covered a whole column of the newspapers,
+there comes a modest little notice that "a special meeting of the
+stockholders will be held for the purpose of transacting business
+of importance." Perhaps it may be to assess the stockholders for the
+purpose of keeping the little land they have, if they have any. Or it
+may be for the election of a new group of officers, for the present
+incumbents do not want to be always before the public. They are modest
+men. They believe in rotation of office. They cannot consent any
+longer to serve. Where have they gone to? They are busy putting up
+a princely mansion at Long Branch, Germantown, or Chelsea. They have
+served their day and generation, and have gone to their flocks and
+herds. Where is the Church of God, that she allows in her membership
+such gigantic abominations? Were the thirty pieces of silver that
+Judas received denounced as unfit, and shall the Church of God have
+nothing to say about this price of blood? Is sin to be excused because
+it is as high as heaven, or deep as hell? The man who allows his name
+to be used as president or director in connection with an enterprise
+that he knows is to result in the sale of twenty thousand shares of an
+undeveloped nothing--God will tear off the cloak of his hypocrisy, and
+in the last day show him to all the universe--a brazen-faced gambler.
+His house will be accursed. God's anathemas will flash in the
+chandelier, and rattle in the swift hoofs of his silver-bitted grays;
+and the day of fire will see him willing to leap into a burning
+oil-well to hide himself from the face of the Lamb. The hundred
+thousand dollars gotten in unrighteousness will not be enough to build
+a barricade against the advance of the divine judgments.
+
+Think of the elder in a church who, from the oil regions, sends an
+exciting telegram, so that one man buys a large amount of stock at
+twelve, on Wednesday. The next day it is put on the stock-board at
+six. The enterprising man, who sold it at twelve, goes out to buy
+one of the grandest estates within ten miles of the city. The man
+who bought it goes into the dust; and the secret gets out that the
+exciting telegram sent by the elder arose, not from any oil actually
+discovered, but because in boring they had found a magnificent odor of
+oil.
+
+If he who steals a dollar from a money-drawer is a thief, then he
+who by dishonesty gets five hundred thousand dollars is five hundred
+thousand times more a thief. And so the last day will declare him.
+
+Did not the law right the injured man? No! The poor who were wronged
+would not undertake a suit against a company that could bring fifty
+thousand dollars to the enlightenment of judge, jury, and lawyer;
+while, on the other hand, the affluent who had been gouged would not
+go to the courts for justice. Why! how would it sound, if it got out,
+that Mr. So and So, one of the first merchants on Wall, or Third, or
+State street, had got swindled? They will keep it still.
+
+The guilty range to-day undisturbed through society, and will
+continue to do so until the Lord God shall bring them to an unerring
+settlement, and proclaim to an astonished universe how many lies they
+told about the land, about the derricks, about the yield, about the
+dividends. What shall such an one say, when God shall, in the great
+day of account, hold up before him the circular, and the map, and the
+newspaper advertisement? Speechless!
+
+Before that day shall come I warn you--Disgorge! you infamous stock
+gamblers! Gather together so many of your company as have any honesty
+left, and join in the following circular:--"_We the undersigned, do
+hereby repent of our villainies, and beg pardon of the public for
+all the wrongs that we have done them; and hereby ask the widows and
+orphans whom we have made penniless to come next Saturday, between ten
+and three o'clock, and receive back what we stole from them. We hereby
+confess that the wells spoken of in our circular never yielded any
+oil; and that the creeks running through our ornamented map were an
+entire fiction; and that the elder who piously rolled up his eyes and
+said it was a safe investment, was not as devout as he looked to be.
+Signed by the subscribers at their office, in the year of our Lord_
+1871."
+
+Then your conscience will be clear, and you can die in peace. But I
+have no faith in such a reformation. When the devil gets such a fair
+hold of a man he hardly ever lets go.
+
+To the young I turn and utter a word of warning. While you are
+determined to be acute business men, resolve at the very threshold
+that you will have nothing to do with stock-_gambling_. This country
+can richly afford to lose the eight hundred millions of dollars
+swindled out of honest people, if our young men, by it, will be warned
+for all the future. Think you such enterprises are forever passed
+away? No! they begin already to clamor for public attention and
+patronage. There are now hundreds of printing-presses busy in making
+pamphlets and circulars for schemes as hollow and nefarious as those I
+have mentioned. There are silver-mining companies, founded upon nobody
+knows what--to accomplish what, nobody cares. There will be other
+Canada gold companies; there will be other copper-mining companies;
+there will be more mutual consumers' coal companies, who, not
+satisfied with the price of ordinary coal-dealers, will resolve
+themselves into consumers' associations, where the thing consumed
+is not the coal, but themselves--the companies that were to be
+immaculate, setting the whole community to playing the game of "Who's
+got the money?"
+
+Stand off from all _doubtful_ enterprises! Resolve that if, in a
+lawful way, you cannot earn a living, then you will die an honest man,
+and be buried in an honest sepulchre.
+
+There are two or three reasons why you should have nothing to do with
+such operations. Mentioning the lowest motive first, it will desolate
+you financially. I asked a man of large observation and undoubted
+integrity, how many of the professed stock-gamblers made a _permanent_
+fortune. He answered, "Not one! not one of those who made this their
+only business." For a little while you may plunge in a round of
+seeming prosperity; but your money is put into a bag with holes. You
+cannot successfully bury a dishonest dollar. You may put it down into
+the very heart of the earth; you may heave rocks upon the top of it;
+on top of the rocks you may put banks and all moneyed institutions,
+but that dishonest dollar beneath will begin to heave and toss and
+upturn itself, and keep on until it comes to the resurrection of
+damnation.
+
+Then this stock-gambling life is wretchedly unhappy. It makes the
+nerves shake, and the brain hot, and the heart sad, and the life
+disquieted.
+
+A man in Philadelphia, who seems to be an exception to the rule--that
+such men do not permanently prosper--who has well on towards a million
+of dollars, and is nearly seventy years of age, may be seen, every
+day, going in and out, eaten up of stocks, torn in an inquisition of
+stocks, rode by a nightmare of stocks; and, with the earnestness of a
+drowning man, he rushes into a broker's shop, crying out: "Did you get
+me those shares?" In such an anxious, exciting life there are griefs,
+disappointments, anguish, but there is no happiness.
+
+Worse than all, it destroys the soul. The day must come when the
+worthless scrip will fall out of the clutches of the stock-gambler.
+Satan will play upon him the "cornering" game which, down on Wall
+street, he played upon a fellow-operator. Now he would be glad to
+exchange all his interest in Venango County for one share in the
+Christian's prospect of heaven. Hopeless, he falls back in his
+last sickness. His delirium is filled with senseless talk about
+"percentages" and "commissions" and "buyer, sixty days," and "stocks
+up," and "stocks down." He thinks that the physician who feels his
+pulse is trying to steal his "board book." He starts up at midnight,
+saying: "One thousand shares of Reading at 116-1/2. Take it!" _Falls
+back dead. No more dividends.... Swindled out of heaven_. STOCKS DOWN!
+
+
+
+
+LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS.
+
+
+The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There
+is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all
+in one. And there is not an interest--religious, literary, commercial,
+scientific, agricultural, or mechanical--that is not within its
+grasp. All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and
+art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press. I shall try to
+bring to your parlor-tables the periodicals that are worthy of the
+Christian fireside, and try to pitch into the gutter of scorn and
+contempt those newspapers that are not fit for the hand of your child
+or the vision of your wife.
+
+The institution of newspapers arose in Italy. In Venice the first
+newspaper was published, and monthly, during the time that Venice was
+warring against Solyman the Second in Dalmatia. It was printed for
+the purpose of giving military and commercial information to the
+Venetians. The first newspaper published in England was in 1588,
+and called the _English Mercury_. Others were styled the _Weekly
+Discoverer_, the _Secret Owl_, _Heraclitus Ridens_, etc.
+
+Who can estimate the political, scientific, commercial, and religious
+revolutions roused up in England for many years past by _Bell's Weekly
+Dispatch_, the _Standard_, the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Post_, and
+the _London Times_?
+
+The first attempt at this institution in France was in 1631, by a
+physician, who published the _News_, for the amusement and health of
+his patients. The French nation understood fully how to appreciate
+this power. Napoleon, with his own hand, wrote articles for the press,
+and so early as in 1829 there were in Paris 169 journals. But in the
+United States the newspaper has come to unlimited sway. Though in
+1775 there were but thirty-seven in the whole country, the number of
+published journals is now counted by thousands; and to-day--we may as
+well acknowledge it as not--the religious and secular newspapers are
+the great _educators of the country_.
+
+In our pulpits we preach to a few hundreds or thousands of people; the
+newspaper addresses an audience of twenty thousand, fifty thousand, or
+two hundred thousand. We preach three or four times a week; they every
+morning or evening of the year. If they are right, they are gloriously
+right; if they are wrong, they are awfully wrong.
+
+I find no difficulty in accounting for the world's advance. Four
+centuries ago, in Germany, in courts of justice, men fought with their
+fists to see who should have the decision of the court; and if the
+judge's decision was unsatisfactory, then the judge fought with the
+counsel. Many of the lords could not read the deeds of their own
+estates. What has made the change?
+
+"Books," you say.
+
+No, sir! The vast majority of citizens do not read books. Take this
+audience, or any other promiscuous assemblage, and how many histories
+have they read? How many treatises on constitutional law, or political
+economy, or works of science? How many elaborate poems or books of
+travel? How much of Boyle, or De Tocqueville, Xenophon, or Herodotus,
+or Percival? Not many!
+
+In the United States, the people would not average one such book a
+year for each individual!
+
+Whence, then, this intelligence--this capacity to talk about all
+themes, secular and religious--this acquaintance with science and
+art--this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand? Next to the
+Bible, the _newspaper_,--swift-winged, and everywhere present,
+flying over the fences, shoved under the door, tossed into the
+counting-house, laid on the work-bench, hawked through the cars! All
+read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American,
+old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after
+tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!
+
+I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency
+by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression
+dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and
+God glorified.
+
+In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear
+the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations
+of the earth,--"Lazarus, come forth!" And to the retreating surges
+of darkness,--"Let there be light!" In many of our city newspapers,
+professing no more than secular information, there have appeared
+during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of
+religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God's
+government among the nations.
+
+That man has a shrivelled heart who begrudges the five pennies he
+pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet. There are
+to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper
+establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable
+morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to
+the work to which they feel themselves called. While you sleep in the
+midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing
+the morning intelligence. Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated,
+their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight
+work, toward premature graves, to have the "proof-sheet" of their
+life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual
+annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry
+for "more copy."
+
+"Nations are to be born in a day." Will this great inrush come from
+personal presence of missionary or philanthropist? No. When the time
+comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth
+will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations. As at
+some telegraphic centre, an operator will send the messages, north and
+south, and east and west, San Francisco and Heart's Content catching
+the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some centre to which
+shall reach all the electric wires that cross the continent and
+undergird the sea, some one shall, with the forefinger of the right
+hand, click the instrument that shall thrill through all lands, across
+all islands, under all seas, through all palaces, into all dungeons,
+and startle both hemispheres with the news, that in a few
+moments shall rush out from the ten thousand times ten thousand
+printing-presses of the earth: "Glory to God in the highest, and on
+earth peace, good-will toward men!"
+
+You see, therefore, that, in the plain words to be written, I have no
+grudges to gratify against the newspaper press. Professional men are
+accustomed to complain of injustice done them, but I take the censure
+I have sometimes received and place it on one side the scales, and the
+excessive praise, and place it on the other side, and they balance,
+and so I consider I have had simple justice. But we are all aware that
+there is a class of men in towns and cities who send forth a baleful
+influence from their editorial pens. There are enough bad newspapers
+weekly poured out into the homes of our country to poison a vast
+population. In addition to the home manufacture of iniquitous sheets,
+the mail-bags of other cities come in gorged with abominations. New
+York scoops up from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own
+newspaper filth. And to-night, lying on the tables of this city, or
+laid away on the shelf, or in the trunk, for more private perusal, are
+papers the mere mention of the names of which would send a blush to
+the cheek, and make the decent and Christian world cry out: "God save
+the city!"
+
+There is a paper published in Boston of outrageous character, and yet
+there are seven thousand copies of that paper coming weekly to New
+York for circulation. I will not mention the name, lest some of you
+should go right away and get it. It is wonderful how quick the fingers
+of the printer-boy fly, but the fingers of sin and pollution can set
+up fifty thousand types in an instant. The supply of bad newspapers
+in New York does not meet the insatiable appetite of our people for
+refuse, and garbage, and moral swill. We must, therefore, import
+corrupt weeklies published elsewhere, that make our newspaper stands
+groan under the burden.
+
+But we need not go abroad. There are papers in New York that long ago
+came to perfection of shamelessness, and there is no more power
+in venom and mud and slime to pollute them. They have dashed their
+iniquities into the face of everything decent and holy. And their work
+will be seen in the crime and debauchery and the hell of innumerable
+victims. Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the
+tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.
+
+God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed
+sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe
+will cry out for their damnation. See the work of bad newspapers
+in the false tidings they bring! There are hundreds of men to-day
+penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent
+positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the
+money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these
+honest men into the mire. And many a window was hoisted at the hour of
+midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra! Extra!" And the father and mother
+who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched
+cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred.
+God pity the father and mother who have a boy at the front when evil
+tidings come! If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty
+persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that
+wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand
+falsehoods.
+
+The most stupendous of all lies is a newspaper lie.
+
+A bad newspaper scruples not at any slander. It may be that, to escape
+the grip of the law, the paragraphs will be nicely worded, so that the
+suspicion is thrown out and the damage done without any exposure to
+the law. Year by year, thousands of men are crushed by the ink-roller.
+An unscrupulous man in the editorial chair may smite as with the
+wing of a destroying angel. What to him is commercial integrity, or
+professional reputation, or woman's honor, or home's sanctity? It
+seems as if he held in his hand a hose with which, while all the
+harpies of sin were working at the pumps, he splashed the waters of
+death upon the best interests of society.
+
+The express-train in England halts not to take in water, but between
+the tracks there is a trough, one-fourth of a mile in length, filled
+with water; and the engine drops a hose that catches up the water
+while the train flies. So with bad newspapers that fly along the track
+of death without pausing a moment, yet scooping up into themselves the
+pollution of society, and in the awful rush making the earth tremble.
+
+The most abandoned man of the city may go to the bad newspaper and get
+a slander inserted about the best man. If he cannot do it in any other
+way, he can by means of an anonymous communication. Now, a man who,
+to injure another, will write an anonymous letter, is, in the first
+place, a coward, and, in the second place, a villain. Many of these
+offensive anonymous letters you see in the bad newspaper have been
+found to be _written in the editorial chair_.
+
+The bad newspaper stops not at any political outrage. It would arouse
+a revolution, and empty the hearts of a million brave men in the
+trenches, rather than not have its own circulation multiply.
+What to it are the hard-earned laurels of the soldier or the exalted
+reputation of the statesman? Its editors would, if they dared, blow
+up the Capitol of the nation if they could only successfully carry off
+the frieze of one of the corridors. There are enough falsehoods told
+at any one of our autumnal elections to make the "Father of Lies"
+disown his monstrous progeny. Now it is the Mayor, then the Governor,
+now the Secretary of State, and then the President, until the air is
+so full of misrepresentation that truth is hidden from the view, as
+beautiful landscapes by the clouds of summer insects blown up from the
+marshes.
+
+The immoral newspaper stops not at the unclean advertisement. It is
+so much for so many words, and in such a sheet it will cost no more
+to advertise the most impure book than the new edition of Pilgrim's
+Progress. A book such as no decent man would touch was a few months
+ago advertised in a New York paper, and the getter-up of the book,
+passing down one of our streets the other day, acknowledged to one of
+my friends that he had made $18,000 out of the enterprise.
+
+In one column of a paper we see a grand ethical discussion, and in
+another the droppings of most accursed nastiness. Oh! you cannot by
+all your religion, in one column, atone for one of your abominations
+in another! I am rejoiced that some of our papers have addressed those
+who have proposed to compensate them for bad use of their columns, in
+the words of Peter to Simon Magus: "Thy money perish with thee!" But I
+arraign the newspapers that give their columns to corrupt advertising
+for the nefarious work they are doing. The most polluted plays that
+ever oozed from the poisonous pen of leprous dramatist have won
+their deathful power through the medium of newspapers; the evil is
+stupendous!
+
+O ye reckless souls! get money--though morality dies, and society is
+dishonored, and God defied, and the doom of the destroyed opens before
+you--get money! Though the melted gold be poured upon your naked,
+blistered, and consuming soul--get money! Get money! It will do you
+good when it begins to eat like a canker! It will solace the pillow
+of death, and soothe the pangs of an agonized eternity! Though in the
+game thou dost stake thy soul, and lose it forever--get money!
+
+The bad newspaper hesitates not to assault Christianity and its
+disciples. With what exhilaration it puts in capitals, that fill
+one-fourth of a column, the defalcation of some agent of a benevolent
+society! There is enough meat in such a carcass of reputation to gorge
+all the carrion-crows of an iniquitous printing-press. They put upon
+the back of the Church all the inconsistencies of hypocrites--as
+though a banker were responsible for all the counterfeits upon his
+institution! They jeer at religion, and lift up their voices until all
+the caverns of the lost resound with the howl of their derision. They
+forget that Christianity is the only hope for the world, and that, but
+for its enlightenment, they would now be like the Hottentots, living
+in mud hovels, or like the Chinese, eating rats.
+
+What would you think of a wretch who, during a great storm, while the
+ship was being tossed to and fro on the angry waves, should climb up
+into the light-house and blow out the light? And what do you think of
+these men, who, while all the Christian and the glorious institutions
+of the world are being tossed and driven hither and thither, are
+trying to climb up and put out the only light of a lost world?
+
+The bad newspaper stops not at publishing the most damaging and
+unclean story. The only question is: "Will it pay?" And there are
+scores of men who, day by day, bring into the newspaper offices
+manuscripts for publication which unite all that is pernicious; and,
+before the ink is fairly dry, tens of thousands are devouring with
+avidity the impure issue. Their sensibilities deadened, their sense
+of right perverted, their purity of thought tarnished, their taste
+for plain life despoiled--the printing-press, with its iron foot, hath
+dashed their life out! While I speak, there are many people, with
+feet on the ottoman, and the gas turned on, looking down on the
+page, submerged, mind and soul, in the perusal of this God-forsaken
+periodical literature; and the last Christian mother will have put
+the hands of the little child under the coverlet for the night, before
+they will rouse up, as the city clock strikes the hour of midnight, to
+go death-struck to their prayerless pillows.
+
+One of the proprietors of a great paper in this country gave his
+advice to a young man then about to start a paper: "If you want to
+succeed," said he, "make your paper trashy, intensely trashy,--make it
+all trash!"
+
+Brilliant advice to a young man just entering business!
+
+It is very often that, as a paper purifies itself, its circulation
+decreases, and sometimes when a paper becomes positively religious, it
+becomes bankrupt, unless some benevolent and Christian men come up
+to sustain it by contributions of money and means. But few religious
+newspapers in this country are self-supporting. The reason urged
+is--the country cannot stand so much religion! Hear it! Christian men
+and philanthropists!
+
+Many papers that are most rapidly increasing to-day are unscrupulous.
+The facts are momentous and appalling. And I put young men and women
+and Christian parents and guardians on the look-out. This stuff cannot
+be handled without pollution. Away with it from parlor, and shop,
+and store! There is so much newspaper literature that _is_ pure, and
+cheap, and elegant; shove back this leprosy from your door.
+
+Mark it well: _a man is no better than the newspaper he habitually
+reads_.
+
+You may think it a bold thing thus to arraign an unprincipled
+printing-press, but I know there are those reading this who will take
+my counsel; and, in the discharge of my duty to God and man, I defy
+all the hostilities of earth and hell!
+
+Representatives of the secular and religious press! I thank you, in
+the name of Christianity and civilization, for the enlightenment of
+ignorance, the overthrow of iniquity, and the words you have uttered
+in the cause of God and your country. But I charge you in the name
+of God, before whom you must account for the tremendous influence you
+hold in this country, to consecrate yourselves to higher endeavors.
+You are the men to fight back this invasion of corrupt literature.
+Lift up your right hand and swear new allegiance to the cause of
+philanthropy and religion. And when, at last, standing on the plains
+of judgment, you look out upon the unnumbered throngs over whom you
+have had influence, may it be found that you were among the mightiest
+energies that lifted men upon the exalted pathway that leads to the
+renown of heaven. Better than to have sat in editorial chair, from
+which, with the finger of type, you decided the destinies of empires,
+but decided them wrong, that you had been some dungeoned exile, who,
+by the light of window iron-grated, on scraps of a New Testament leaf,
+picked up from the hearth, spelled out the story of Him who taketh
+away the sins of the world.
+
+IN ETERNITY, DIVES IS THE BEGGAR!
+
+
+
+
+THE FATAL TEN-STRIKE.
+
+
+While among my readers are those who have passed on into the afternoon
+of life, and the shadows are lengthening, and the sky crimsons with
+the glow of the setting sun, a large number of them are in early life,
+and the morning is coming down out of the clear sky upon them, and the
+bright air is redolent with spring blossoms, and the stream of life,
+gleaming and glancing, rushes on between flowery banks, making music
+as it goes. Some of you are engaged in mercantile establishments, as
+clerks and book-keepers; and your whole life is to be passed in the
+exciting world of traffic. The sound of busy life stirs you as the
+drum stirs the fiery war-horse. Others are in the mechanical arts, to
+hammer and chisel your way through life; and success awaits you.
+Some are preparing for professional life, and grand opportunities are
+before you; nay, some of you already have buckled on the armor.
+
+But, whatever your age or calling, the subject of gambling, about
+which I speak in this chapter, is pertinent.
+
+Some years ago, when an association for the suppression of gambling
+was organized, an agent of the association came to a prominent citizen
+and asked him to patronize the society. He said, "No, I can have no
+interest in such an organization. I am in no wise affected by that
+evil."
+
+At that very time his son, who was his partner in business, was one of
+the heaviest players in "Herne's" famous gaming establishment. Another
+refused his patronage on the same ground, not knowing that his first
+book-keeper, though receiving a salary of only a thousand dollars, was
+losing from fifty to one hundred dollars per night. The president of
+a railroad company refused to patronize the institution, saying--"That
+society is good for the defence of merchants, but we railroad people
+are not injured by this evil;" not knowing that, at that very time,
+two of his conductors were spending three nights of each week at faro
+tables in New York. Directly or indirectly, this evil strikes at the
+whole world.
+
+Gambling is the risking of something more or less valuable in the hope
+of winning more than you hazard. The instruments of gaming may differ,
+but the principle is the same. The shuffling and dealing of cards,
+however full of temptation, is not gambling, unless stakes are put up;
+while, on the other hand, gambling may be carried on without cards, or
+dice, or billiards, or a ten-pin alley. The man who bets on horses,
+on elections, on battles--the man who deals in "fancy" stocks,
+or conducts a business which extra hazards capital, or goes into
+transactions without foundation, but dependent upon what men call
+"luck," is a gambler.
+
+It is estimated that one-fourth of the business in London is done
+dishonestly. Whatever you expect to get from your neighbor without
+offering an equivalent in money or time or skill, is either the
+product of theft or gaming. Lottery tickets and lottery policies come
+into the same category. Fairs for the founding of hospitals, schools
+and churches, conducted on the raffling system, come under the same
+denomination. Do not, therefore, associate gambling necessarily with
+any instrument, or game, or time, or place, or think the principle
+depends upon whether you play for a glass of wine, or one hundred
+shares in _Camden and Amboy_. Whether you employ faro or billiards,
+rondo and keno, cards, or bagatelle, the very _idea_ of the thing is
+dishonest; for it professes to bestow upon you a good for which you
+_give no equivalent_.
+
+This crime is no newborn sprite, but a haggard transgression that
+comes staggering down under a mantle of curses through many centuries.
+All nations, barbarous and civilized, have been addicted to it. Before
+1838, the French government received revenue from gaming houses.
+In 1567, England, for the improvement of her harbors, instituted a
+lottery, to be held at the front door of St. Paul's Cathedral. Four
+hundred thousand tickets were sold, at ten shillings each. The
+British Museum and Westminster Bridge were partially built by similar
+procedures. The ancient Germans would sometimes put up themselves and
+families as prizes, and suffer themselves to be bound, though stronger
+than the persons who won them.
+
+But now the laws of the whole civilized world denounce the system.
+Enactments have been passed, but only partially enforced. The men
+interested in gaming houses wield such influence, by their numbers and
+affluence, that the judge, the jury, and the police officer must
+be bold indeed who would array themselves against these infamous
+establishments. Within ten years the House of Commons of England has
+adjourned on "Derby Day" to go out to bet on the races; and in the
+best circles of society in this country to-day are many hundreds of
+professedly respectable men who are acknowledged gamblers.
+
+Hundreds of thousands of dollars in this land are every day being won
+and lost through sheer gambling. Says a traveller through the West--"I
+have travelled a thousand miles at a time upon the Western waters
+and seen gambling at every waking moment from the commencement to the
+termination of the journey." The South-west of this country reeks with
+this abomination. In New Orleans every third or fourth house in many
+of the streets is a gaming place, and it may be truthfully averred
+that each and all of our cities are cursed with this evil.
+
+In themselves most of the games employed in gambling are without harm.
+Billiard-tables are as harmless as tea-tables, and a pack of cards as
+a pack of letter envelopes, unless stakes be put up. But by their use
+for gambling purposes they have become significant of an infinity
+of wretchedness. In New York city there are said to be six thousand
+houses devoted to this sin; in Philadelphia about four thousand; in
+Cincinnati about one thousand; at Washington the amount of gaming is
+beyond calculation. There have been seasons when, by night, Senators,
+Representatives, and Ministers of Foreign Governments were found
+engaged in this practice.
+
+Men wishing to gamble will find places just suited to their capacity,
+not only in the underground oyster-cellar, or at the table back of the
+curtain, covered with greasy cards, or in the steamboat smoking cabin,
+where the bloated wretch with rings in his ears deals out his pack,
+and winks in the unsuspecting traveller,--providing free drinks all
+around,--but in gilded parlors and amid gorgeous surroundings.
+
+This sin works ruin, first, by unhealthful stimulants. Excitement is
+pleasurable. Under every sky, and in every age, men have sought it.
+The Chinaman gets it by smoking his opium; the Persian by chewing
+hashish; the trapper in a buffalo hunt; the sailor in a squall; the
+inebriate in the bottle, and the avaricious at the gaming-table.
+
+We must at times have excitement. A thousand voices in our nature
+demand it. It is right. It is healthful. It is inspiriting. It is a
+desire God-given. But anything that first gratifies this appetite and
+hurls it back in a terrific reaction is deplorable and wicked. Look
+out for the agitation that, like a rough musician, in bringing out the
+tune, plays so hard he breaks down the instrument!
+
+God never made man strong enough to endure the wear and tear of
+gambling excitement. No wonder if, after having failed in the game,
+men have begun to sweep off imaginary gold from the side of the table.
+The man was sharp enough when he started at the game, but a maniac at
+the close. At every gaming-table sit on one side Ecstasy, Enthusiasm,
+Romance--the frenzy of joy; on the other side, Fierceness, Rage,
+and Tumult. The professional gamester schools himself into apparent
+quietness. The keepers of gambling rooms are generally fat,
+rollicking, and obese; but thorough and professional gamblers, in nine
+cases out of ten, are pale, thin, wheezing, tremulous, and exhausted.
+
+A young man, having suddenly heired a large property, sits at the
+hazard-table, and takes up in a dice-box the estate won by a father's
+lifetime sweat, and shakes it, and tosses it away.
+
+Intemperance soon stigmatizes its victim--kicking him out, a slavering
+fool, into the ditch, or sending him, with the drunkard's hiccough,
+staggering up the street where his family lives. But gambling does
+not, in that way, expose its victims. The gambler may be eaten up by
+the gambler's passion, yet only discover it by the greed in his eyes,
+the hardness of his features, the nervous restlessness, the threadbare
+coat, and his embarrassed business. Yet he is on the road to hell,
+and no preacher's voice, or startling warning, or wife's entreaty, can
+make him stay for a moment his headlong career. The infernal spell
+is on him; a giant is aroused within; and though you bind him with
+cables, they would part like thread; and though you fasten him seven
+times round with chains, they would snap like rusted wire; and though
+you piled up in his path, heaven-high, Bibles, tracts and sermons, and
+on the top should set the cross of the Son of God, over them all the
+gambler would leap like a roe over the rocks, on his way to perdition.
+
+Again, this sin works ruin by killing industry.
+
+A man used to reaping scores or hundreds of dollars from the
+gaming-table will not be content with slow work. He will say, "What is
+the use of trying to make these fifty dollars in my store when I can
+get five times that in half an hour down at 'Billy's'?" You never knew
+a confirmed gambler who was industrious. The men given to this vice
+spend their time not actively employed in the game in idleness, or
+intoxication, or sleep, or in corrupting new victims. This sin has
+dulled the carpenter's saw, and cut the band of the factory wheel,
+sunk the cargo, broken the teeth of the farmer's harrow, and sent a
+strange lightning to shatter the battery of the philosopher.
+
+The very first idea in gaming is at war with all the industries of
+society. Any trade or occupation that is of use is ennobling. The
+street sweeper advances the interests of society by the cleanliness
+effected. The cat pays for the fragments it eats by clearing the house
+of vermin. The fly that takes the sweetness from the dregs of the cup
+compensates by purifying the air and keeping back the pestilence. But
+the gambler gives not anything for that which he takes.
+
+I recall that sentence. He _does_ make a return; but it is disgrace to
+the man that he fleeces, despair to his heart, ruin to his business,
+anguish to his wife, shame to his children, and eternal wasting away
+to his soul. He pays in tears and blood, and agony, and darkness, and
+woe.
+
+What dull work is ploughing to the farmer, when in the village saloon,
+in one night, he makes and loses the value of a summer harvest? Who
+will want to sell tape, and measure nankeen, and cut garments, and
+weigh sugars, when in a night's game he makes and loses, and makes
+again, and loses again, the profits of a season?
+
+John Borack was sent as mercantile agent from Bremen to England and
+this country. After two years his employers mistrusted that all was
+not right. He was a defaulter for eighty-seven thousand dollars. It
+was found that he had lost in Lombard street, London, twenty-nine
+thousand dollars; in Fulton street, New York, ten thousand dollars;
+and in New Orleans, three thousand dollars. He was imprisoned, but
+afterwards escaped and went into the gambling profession. He died in a
+lunatic asylum.
+
+This crime is getting its pry under many a mercantile house in our
+cities, and before long down will come the great establishment,
+crushing reputation, home, comfort, and immortal souls. How it diverts
+and sinks capital may be inferred from some authentic statements
+before us. The ten gaming-houses that once were authorized in Paris
+passed through the banks, yearly, three hundred and twenty-five
+millions of francs! The houses of this kind in Germany yield vast sums
+to the government. The Hamburg establishment pays to the government
+treasury forty thousand florins; and Baden Baden one hundred
+and twenty thousand florins. Each one of the banks in the large
+gaming-houses of Germany has forty or fifty croupiers standing in its
+service.
+
+Where does all the money come from? _The whole world is robbed!_ What
+is most sad, there are no consolations for the loss and suffering
+entailed by gaming. If men fail in lawful business, God pities, and
+society commiserates; but where in the Bible, or in society, is there
+any consolation for the gambler? From what tree of the forest oozes
+there a balm that can soothe the gamester's heart? In that bottle
+where God keeps the tears of his children, are there any tears of the
+gambler? Do the winds that come to kiss the faded cheek of sickness,
+and to cool the heated brow of the laborer, whisper hope and cheer to
+the emaciated victim of the game of hazard? When an honest man is in
+trouble, he has sympathy. "Poor fellow!" they say. But do gamblers
+come to weep at the agonies of the gambler? In Northumberland was one
+of the finest estates in England. Mr. Porter owned it, and in a year
+gambled it all away. Having lost the last acre of the estate, he came
+down from the saloon and got into his carriage; went back; put up his
+horses, and carriage, and town house, and played. He threw and
+lost. He started home, and on a side alley met a friend from whom
+he borrowed ten guineas; went back to the saloon, and before a great
+while had won twenty thousand pounds. He died at last a beggar in St.
+Giles. How many gamblers felt sorry for Mr. Porter? Who consoled him
+on the loss of his estate? What gambler subscribed to put a stone over
+the poor man's grave? Not one!
+
+Furthermore, this sin is the source of uncounted dishonesties. The
+game of hazard itself is often a cheat. How many tricks and deceptions
+in the dealing of the cards! The opponent's hand is ofttimes found
+out by fraud. Cards are marked so that they may be designated from the
+back. Expert gamesters have their accomplices, and one wink may
+decide the game. The dice have been found loaded with platina, so
+that "doublets" come up every time. These dice are introduced by the
+gamblers unobserved by the honest men who have come into the play;
+and this accounts for the fact that ninety-nine out of a hundred who
+gamble, however wealthy they began, at the end are found to be poor,
+miserable, ragged wretches, that would not now be allowed to sit on
+the door-step of the house that they once owned.
+
+In a gaming-house in San Francisco, a young man having just come
+from the mines deposited a large sum upon the ace, and won twenty-two
+thousand dollars. But the tide turns. Intense anxiety comes upon the
+countenances of all. Slowly the cards went forth. Every eye is fixed.
+Not a sound is heard, until the ace is revealed favorable to the bank.
+There are shouts of "Foul! Foul!" but the keepers of the table
+produce their pistols and the uproar is silenced, and the bank has won
+ninety-five thousand dollars. Do you call this a game of chance? There
+is no chance about it.
+
+But these dishonesties in the carrying on of the game are nothing when
+compared with the frauds which are committed in order to get money
+to go on with the nefarious work. Gambling, with its greedy hand, has
+snatched away the widow's mite and the portion of the orphans; has
+sold the daughter's virtue to get means to continue the game; has
+written the counterfeit signature, emptied the banker's money vault,
+and wielded the assassin's dagger. There is no depth of meanness to
+which it will not stoop. There is no cruelty at which it is appalled.
+There is no warning of God that it will not dare. Merciless,
+unappeasable, fiercer and wilder it blinds, it hardens, it rends, it
+blasts, it crushes, it damns. It has peopled Moyamensing, and Auburn,
+and Sing Sing.
+
+How many railroad agents, and cashiers, and trustees of funds, it has
+driven to disgrace, incarceration, and suicide! Witness a cashier of
+the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, who stole one
+hundred and three thousand dollars to carry on his gaming practices.
+Witness the forty thousand dollars stolen from a Brooklyn bank; and
+the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars taken from a Wall Street
+Insurance Company for the same purpose! These are only illustrations
+on a large scale of the robberies _every day_ committed for the
+purpose of carrying out the designs of gamblers. Hundreds of thousands
+of dollars every year leak out without observation from the merchant's
+till into the gambling hell.
+
+A man in London keeping one of these gambling houses boasted that he
+had ruined a nobleman a day; but if all the saloons of this land were
+to speak out, they might utter a more infamous boast, for they have
+destroyed a thousand noblemen a year.
+
+Notice also the effect of this crime upon domestic happiness. It hath
+sent its ruthless ploughshare through hundreds of families, until the
+wife sat in rags, and the daughters were disgraced, and the sons grew
+up to the same infamous practices, or took a short cut to destruction
+across the murderer's scaffold. Home has lost all charms for the
+gambler. How tame are the children's caresses and a wife's devotion to
+the gambler! How drearily the fire burns on the domestic hearth! There
+must be louder laughter, and something to win and something to lose;
+an excitement to drive the heart faster and fillip the blood and fire
+the imagination. No home, however bright, can keep back the gamester.
+The sweet call of love bounds back from his iron soul, and all
+endearments are consumed in the flame of his passion. The family Bible
+will go after all other treasures are lost, and if his everlasting
+crown in heaven were put into his hand he would cry: "Here goes, one
+more game, my boys! On this one throw I stake my crown of heaven."
+
+A young man in London, on coming of age, received a fortune of one
+hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and through gambling in three
+years was thrown on his mother for support.
+
+An only son went to New Orleans. He was rich, intellectual, and
+elegant in manners. His parents gave him, on his departure from home,
+their last blessing. The sharpers got hold of him. They flattered him.
+They lured him to the gaming-table and let him win almost every time
+for a good while, and patted him on the back and said, "First-rate
+player." But, fully in their grasp, they fleeced him; and his thirty
+thousand dollars were lost. Last of all he put up his watch and lost
+that. Then he began to think of home and of his old father and mother,
+and wrote thus:--
+
+    "MY BELOVED PARENTS:--You will doubtless feel a momentary joy
+    at the reception of this letter from the child of your bosom,
+    on whom you have lavished all the favors of your declining
+    years. But should a feeling of joy for a moment spring up
+    in your hearts when you shall have received this from, me,
+    cherish it not. I have fallen deep--never to rise. Those gray
+    hairs that I should have honored and protected I shall bring
+    down with sorrow to the grave. I will not curse my destroyer,
+    but oh! may God avenge the wrongs and impositions practised
+    upon the unwary in a way that shall best please Him. This, my
+    dear parents, is the last letter you will ever receive from
+    me. I humbly pray your forgiveness. It is my dying prayer.
+    Long before you shall have received this letter from me the
+    cold grave will have closed upon me forever. Life is to me
+    insupportable. I cannot, nay, I will not suffer the shame of
+    having ruined you. Forget and forgive is the dying prayer of
+    your unfortunate son."
+
+The old father came to the post-office, got the letter, and fell to
+the floor. They thought he was dead at first; but they brushed back
+the white hair from his brow and fanned him. He had only fainted. I
+wish he had been dead; for what is life worth to a father after his
+son is destroyed?
+
+When things go wrong at a gaming-table, they shout "Foul! foul!" Over
+all the gaming-tables of the world I cry out "Foul! foul! Infinitely
+foul!"
+
+In modern days, in addition to the other forms of gambling, have
+come up the thoroughly organized and, in some States, _legalized_
+institution of lotteries. There are hundreds of citizens on the way to
+ruin through the lottery system. Some of the finest establishments in
+town are by this process being demolished, and the whole land feels
+the exhaustion of this accumulating evil. The wheel of Fortune is the
+Juggernaut that is crushing out the life of this nation. The records
+of the Insolvent Court of one city show that, in five years, two
+hundred thousand dollars were lost by dealing in lottery tickets. All
+the officers of the celebrated Bank of the United States who failed
+were found to have expended the money embezzled for lottery tickets.
+
+A man drew in a lottery fifty thousand dollars, sold his ticket for
+forty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and yet did not have enough
+to pay the charges against him for lottery tickets. He owed the
+brokers forty-five thousand dollars.
+
+An editor writes--"A man who, a few years ago, was blest with about
+twenty thousand dollars (lottery money), yesterday applied to us for
+ninepence to pay for a night's lodging."
+
+A highly respectable gentleman drew twenty thousand dollars in a
+lottery; bought more tickets, and drew again; bought more--drew more
+largely; then rushed down headlong until he was pronounced by the
+select men of the village a vagabond, and his children were picked up
+from the street half starved and almost naked.
+
+A hard-working machinist draws a thousand dollars; thenceforth he is
+disgusted with work, opens a rum grocery, is utterly debauched, and
+people go in his store to find him dead, close beside his rum-cask.
+
+It would take a pen plucked from the wing of the destroying angel and
+dipped in blood to describe this lottery business.
+
+A man committed suicide in New York, and upon his person was found a
+card of address giving a grog-shop as his boarding house, three blank
+lottery tickets, and a leaf from _Seneca's Morals_, containing an
+apology for self-murder.
+
+One lottery in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who
+held unlucky numbers.
+
+There are men now, with lottery tickets in their pocket, which, if
+they have not sense enough to tear up or throw into the fire, will be
+their admission ticket at the door of the damned. As the brazen gates
+swing open they will show their tickets, and pass in and pass down. As
+the wheel of eternal Fortune turns slowly round, they will find that
+the doom of those who have despised God and imperilled their souls
+will be their awful prize.
+
+God forbid that you, my reader, should ever take to yourself the
+lamentation of the Boston clerk, who, in eight months, had embezzled
+eighteen thousand dollars from his employer and expended it all in
+lottery tickets. "I have for the last seven months gone fast down the
+broad road. There was a time, and that but a few months since, when
+I was happy, because I was free from debt and care. The moment of the
+first steps in my downfall was about the middle of last June, when
+I took a share in a company, bought lottery tickets whereby I was
+successful in obtaining a share of one-half of the capital prize,
+since which I have gone for myself. I have lived and dragged out a
+miserable existence for two or three months past. Oh, that the seven
+or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must
+go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker,
+to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal
+sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence. Relatives
+and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such
+circumstances, but necessity compels. Oh, wretch! lottery tickets have
+been thy ruin. But I cannot add more."
+
+There are multitudes of people who disapprove of ordinary lotteries,
+yet have been thoroughly deceived by iniquity under a more attractive
+nomenclature. The lottery in which our most highly respectable and
+Christian people invest is some "Art Association," or some benevolent
+"Gift Enterprise," in which they fondly believe there can be no harm
+in drawing Bierstadt's _Yosemite Valley_, or Cropsey's _American
+Autumn_!
+
+At no time have lottery tickets been sown so broadcast as to-day,
+notwithstanding the law forbids the old-style lottery.
+
+A few years ago our newspapers flamed with the advertisements of the
+Crosby Opera House scheme. A citizen of Chicago, finding on his hands
+an unprofitable building, calls upon the whole country to help him
+out. Rooms are opened in all the great cities. In rush, not the
+abandoned and the reprobate (for _they_ like the old styles of
+swindling better), but the educated and refined and polished, until a
+host of people are in imminent peril of having thrown upon their hands
+a splendid Opera House. Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars
+worth of tickets. The portentous day approaches. The rail trains from
+many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who
+come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and
+Christian manner. The throng presses in. Hold fast your tickets, all
+you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the
+wheel begins to move. The long agony is over. Hundreds of thousands
+of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden
+affluence. Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up
+to the house of him who owns the successful ticket. The lightnings
+tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten
+forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who
+owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Multitudes think that there has been
+foul play, and that, after all, they themselves, if the truth were
+known, did draw the Opera House. Ten years from now there will stand
+on the scaffold, or behind the prison door, or in the lonely room in
+which the suicide writes his farewell to wife or parents, men who will
+say that the first misstep of their life that put them on the wrong
+road was the ticket they bought in the Crosby Opera House.
+
+The man who won that prize is already dead of his dissipations, and,
+strange to say, the beautiful building thus raffled away was found to
+be owned by its original possessor when all the excitement in regard
+to the matter had died away.
+
+I care not on what street the office was, nor who were the abettors
+of the undertaking, nor who bought the tickets. I pronounce the whole
+scheme to have been a swindle, a crime, and an insult to God and the
+nation.
+
+In this class of gambler-makers I also put the "gift stores," which
+are becoming abundant throughout the country. With a book, or knife,
+or sewing machine, or coat, or carriage there goes a _prize_. At those
+stores people get something thrown in with their purchase. It may be a
+gold watch or a set of silver, a ring or a farm. Sharp way to get off
+unsalable goods. It has filled the land with fictitious articles and
+covered up our population with brass finger-rings, and despoiled
+the moral sense of the community, and is fast making us a nation of
+gamblers.
+
+The Church of God has not seemed willing to allow the world to have
+all the advantage of these games of chance. A church fair opens, and
+towards the close it is found that some of the more valuable articles
+are unsalable. Forthwith the conductors of the enterprise conclude
+that they will _raffle_ for some of the valuable articles, and, under
+pretence of anxiety to make their minister a present, or please some
+popular member of the church, fascinating persons are despatched
+through the room, pencil in hand, to "solicit" shares; or perhaps each
+draws for his own advantage, and scores of people go home with their
+trophies, thinking that all is right, for Christian ladies did the
+embroidery, and Christian men did the raffling, and the proceeds went
+towards a new communion set. But you may depend on it that, as far as
+morality is concerned, you might as well have won by the crack of the
+billiard-ball or the turn of the dice-box.
+
+Some good people cannot stand this raffling, and so, at fairs, they go
+to "voting," sometimes for editors, and sometimes for ministers, at
+a dollar a vote. Now the Methodist minister is ahead; now the
+Presbyterian leads, and now the Baptist. But, just at the last moment,
+when one of the ministers of the more popular sect seems sure to get
+the prize, the members from some obscure denomination, that do not
+deserve the prize, come in, and by a large contribution carry off for
+_their_ minister the silver tea-set.
+
+Do you wonder that churches built, lighted, or upholstered by such
+processes as that come to great financial and spiritual decrepitude?
+The devil says: "_I_ helped build that house of worship, and I have as
+much right there as you have;" and for once the devil is right.
+
+We do not read that they had a lottery for building the church at
+Corinth or Antioch, or for getting up a gold-headed cane or for an
+embroidered surplice for Saint Paul. All this I style ecclesiastical
+gambling. More than one man who is destroyed can say that his first
+step on the wrong road was when he won something at a church fair.
+
+The gambling spirit has not stopped for any indecency. There lately
+transpired, in Maryland, a lottery in which people drew for lots in
+a burying-ground! The modern habit of betting about everything is
+productive of immense mischief. The most healthful and innocent
+amusements of yachting and base-ball playing have been the occasion of
+putting up excited and extravagant wagers. That which to many has
+been advantageous to body and mind has been to others the means of
+financial and moral loss. The custom is pernicious in the extreme
+where scores of men in respectable life give themselves up to betting,
+now on this boat now on that--now on the Atlantics and now on the
+Athletics.
+
+Betting, that once was chiefly the accompaniment of the race-course,
+is fast becoming a national habit, and in some circles any
+opinion advanced on finance or politics is accosted with the
+interrogatory--"How much will you bet on _that_, sir?"
+
+This custom may make no appeal to slow, lethargic temperaments,
+but there are in the country tens of thousands of quick, nervous,
+sanguine, excitable temperaments ready to be acted upon, and their
+feet will soon take hold on death. For some months and perhaps for
+years they will linger in the more polite and elegant circle of
+gamesters, but, after a while, their pathway will come to the fatal
+plunge. Finding themselves in the rapids, they will try to back out,
+and, hurled over the brink, they will clutch the side of the boat
+until their finger-nails, blood-tipped, will pierce the wood, and
+then, with white cheek and agonized stare, and the horrors of the lost
+soul lifting the very hair from the scalp, they will plunge down where
+no grappling hooks can drag them out.
+
+Young man! stand back from all styles of gambling! The end thereof
+is death. The gamblers enter the ten-pin alley where are husbands,
+brothers, and fathers. "Put down your thousand dollars all in gold
+eagles! Let the boy set up the pins at the other end of the alley! Now
+stand back, and give the gamester full sweep! Roll the first--there!
+it strikes! and down goes his respectability. Try it again. Roll the
+second--there! it strikes! and down goes the last feeling of humanity.
+Try it again. Roll the third--there! it strikes! and down goes his
+soul forever. It was not so much the pins that fell as the soul! the
+soul! FATAL TEN-STRIKE FOR ETERNITY!"
+
+Shall I sketch the history of the gambler? Lured by bad company, he
+finds his way into a place where honest men ought never to go. He
+sits down to his first game only for pastime and the desire of being
+thought sociable. The players deal out the cards. They unconsciously
+play into Satan's hands, who takes all the tricks, and both the
+players' souls for trumps--he being a sharper at any game. A slight
+stake is put up just to add interest to the play. Game after game is
+played. Larger stakes and still larger. They begin to move nervously
+on their chairs. Their brows lower and eyes flash, until now they who
+win and they who lose, fired alike with passion, sit with set jaws,
+and compressed lips, and clenched fists, and eyes like fire-balls
+that seem starting from their sockets, to see the final turn before
+it comes; if losing, pale with envy and tremulous with unuttered
+oaths cast back red-hot upon the heart--or, winning, with hysteric
+laugh--"Ha! Ha! I have it! I have it!"
+
+A few years have passed, and he is only the wreck of a man. Seating
+himself at the game ere he throws the first card, he stakes the last
+relic of his wife, and the marriage-ring which sealed the solemn vows
+between them. The game is lost, and, staggering back in exhaustion,
+he dreams. The bright hours of the past mock his agony, and in his
+dreams, fiends, with eyes of fire and tongues of flame, circle about
+him with joined hands, to dance and sing their orgies with hellish
+chorus, chanting--"Hail! brother!" kissing his clammy forehead until
+their loathsome locks, flowing with serpents, crawl into his bosom
+and sink their sharp fangs and suck up his life's blood, and coiling
+around his heart pinch it with chills and shudders unutterable.
+
+Take warning! You are no stronger than tens of thousands who have, by
+this practice, been overthrown. No young man in our cities can escape
+being tempted. _Beware of the first beginnings!_ This road is a
+down-grade, and every instant increases the momentum. Launch not upon
+this treacherous sea. Split hulks strew the beach. Everlasting storms
+howl up and down, tossing the unwary crafts into the Hell-gate. I
+speak of what I have seen with my own eyes. I have looked off into the
+abyss and have seen the foaming, and the hissing, and the whirling
+of the horrid deep in which the mangled victims writhed, one
+upon another, and struggled, strangled, blasphemed, and died--the
+death-stare of eternal despair upon their countenances as the waters
+gurgled over them.
+
+To a gambler's death-bed there comes no hope. He will probably die
+alone. His former associates come not nigh his dwelling. When the
+hour comes, his miserable soul will go out of a miserable life into
+a miserable eternity. As his poor remains pass the house where he was
+ruined, old companions may look out a moment and say--"There goes the
+old carcass--dead at last," but they will not get up from the table.
+Let him down now into his grave. Plant no tree to cast its shade
+there, for the long, deep, eternal gloom that settles there is shadow
+enough. Plant no "forget-me-nots" or eglantines around the spot, for
+flowers were not made to grow on such a blasted heath. Visit it not in
+the sunshine, for that would be mockery, but in the dismal night, when
+no stars are out, and the spirits of darkness come down horsed on the
+wind, _then_ visit the grave of the gambler!
+
+
+
+
+SOME OF THE CLUB-HOUSES.
+
+
+Iniquity never gives a fair fight. It springs out from ambush upon
+the unsuspecting. Of the tens of thousands who have fallen into bad
+habits, not one deliberately leaped off, but all were caught in some
+sly trap. You may have watched a panther or a cat about to take its
+prey. It crouches down, puts its mouth between its paws, and is hardly
+to be seen in the long grass. So iniquity always crouches down in
+unexpected shapes, takes aim with unerring eye, and then springs
+upon you with sudden and terrific leap. In secret places and in
+unlooked-for shapes it murders the innocent.
+
+Men are gregarious. Cattle in herds. Fish in schools. Birds in flocks.
+Men in social circles. You may, by the discharge of a gun, scatter
+a flock of quails, or by the plunge of the anchor send apart the
+denizens of the sea; but they will gather themselves together again.
+If you, by some new power, could break the associations in which men
+now stand, they would again adhere. God meant it so. He has gathered
+all the flowers and shrubs into associations. You may plant one
+"forget-me-not" or "hearts-ease" alone, away off upon the hillside,
+but it will soon hunt up some other "forget-me-not" or "hearts-ease."
+Plants love company; you will find them talking to each other in the
+dew. A galaxy of stars is only a mutual life-insurance company. You
+sometimes see a man with no out-branchings of sympathy. His nature is
+cold and hard, like a ship's mast, ice-glazed, which the most agile
+sailor could never climb. Others have a thousand roots and a thousand
+branches. Innumerable tendrils climb their hearts, and blossom all the
+way up; and the fowls of heaven sing in the branches.
+
+In consequence of this tendency, we find men coming together in
+tribes, in communities, in churches, in societies. Some gather
+together to cultivate the arts; some to plan for the welfare of the
+State; some to discuss religious themes; some to kindle their mirth;
+some to advance their craft. So every active community is divided into
+associations of artists, of merchants, of bookbinders, of carpenters,
+of masons, of plasterers, of shipwrights, of plumbers. Do you cry out
+against it? Then you cry out against a tendency divinely implanted.
+Your tirades will accomplish no more than if you should preach to a
+busy ant-hill or bee-hive a long sermon against secret societies.
+
+Here we find in our path the oft-discussed question, whether
+associations that do their work with closed doors, and admit their
+members by pass-words, and greet each other with a secret grip, are
+right or wrong. I answer that it depends entirely upon the nature of
+the object for which they meet. Is it to pass the hours in revelry,
+wassail, blasphemy, and obscene talk, or to plot trouble to the State,
+or to debauch the innocent? Then I say, with an emphasis that no man
+can mistake, "NO." But is the object the improvement of the mind,
+or the enlargement of the heart, or the advancement of art, or
+the defence of the government, or the extirpation of crime, or the
+kindling of a pure-hearted sociality? Then I say, with just as much
+emphasis, "YES."
+
+There is no need that we who plan for the conquest of right over wrong
+should publish to all the world our intentions. The general of an
+army never sends to the opposing troops information as to the coming
+attack. Shall we who have enlisted in the cause of God and humanity
+expose our plans to the enemy? No! We will in secret plot the ruin of
+all the enterprises of Satan and his cohorts. When they expect us by
+day, we will fall upon them by night. While they are strengthening
+their left wing, we will double up their right. By a plan of battle
+formed in secret conclave, we will come suddenly upon them, crying:
+"The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!"
+
+Secrecy of plot and execution are wrong only when the object and
+influence are nefarious. Every family is a secret society; every
+business firm, and every banking and insurance institution. Those men
+who have no capacity to keep a secret are unfit for positions of trust
+anywhere. There are thousands of men whose vital need is culturing in
+capacity to keep a secret. Men talk too much--and women too. There
+is a time to keep silence, as well as a time to speak. Although not
+belonging to any of the great secret societies about which there has
+been so much violent discussion, I have only words of praise for
+those associations which have for their object the reclamation of
+inebriates, or like the score of mutual benefit societies, called by
+different names, that provide temporary relief for widows and orphans,
+and for men incapacitated by sickness or accident for earning a
+livelihood.
+
+I suppose there are club-houses in our cities to which men go with
+clear consciences, and from which they come after an hour or two
+of intellectual talk, and cheerful interview, to enjoy the domestic
+circle. But that this is not the character of scores and hundreds of
+club-houses we all know. Can I, then, pass this subject by without
+exposition of the monstrous evil? There are multitudes who are
+unconsciously having their physical, moral, and eternal well-being
+endangered by club-room dissipation. Was it right to expose the plot
+of Guy Fawkes, by which he would have destroyed the Parliament of
+England? And am I wrong in disclosing a peril which threatens not only
+your well-being here, but your throne in heaven?
+
+I deplore this ruin the more because this style of dissipation is
+taking down our finest men. The admission-fee sifts out the penurious
+and takes only those who are called the best fellows. Oh! how changed
+you are! Not so kind to your wife as you used to be; not so patient
+with your children. Your conscience is not so much at rest. You laugh
+more now, and sing louder than once, but are not half so happy. It is
+not the public drinking-saloon that is taking you down, nor theatrical
+amusements, nor the houses of sin that have cost thousands of other
+men their eternity: but it is simply and undeniably your club-room.
+You do not make yourself as agreeable in your family as once. You go
+home at twelve o'clock with an unnatural flush upon your cheek and
+a strange color in your eye that you got at the club. You merely
+acknowledge that you feel queer. You say that champagne never
+intoxicates; that it only exhilarates, makes the conversation fluent,
+shakes up the humor, and has no bad effect except a headache next day.
+Be not deceived. Champagne may not, like whiskey, throw a man under
+the table; but if, through anything you drink, you gain an unnatural
+fluency of speech and glow of feeling, you are simply drunk.
+
+If those imperilled were heartless young men, stingy young men, I
+would not be so sorry as I am; but there are many of them generous to
+a fault, frank, honest, cheerful, talented. I begrudge the devil such
+a prize. After a while these persons will lose all the frankness and
+honor for which they are now distinguished. Their countenances will
+get haggard, and instead of looking one in the eye when they talk,
+they will look down. After a while, when the mother kindly asks, "What
+kept you out so late?" they will make no answer, or will say "That is
+my business!" They will come cross and befogged to the store and
+bank, and ever and anon neglect some duty, and after a while will be
+dismissed: and then, with nothing to do, will rise in the morning at
+ten o'clock, cursing the servant because the breakfast is cold, and
+then go down town and stand on the steps of a fashionable hotel, and
+criticise the passers-by. While the young man who was a clerk in a
+cellar has come up to be the first clerk, and he who a few years ago
+ran errands for the bank has got to be cashier, and thousands of other
+young men of the city have gone up to higher and more responsible
+positions, he has been going down, until there he passes through the
+street with bloated lip, and bloodshot eye, and staggering step, and
+hat mud-spattered and set sidewise on a shock of greasy hair, the
+ashes of his cigar dashed upon his cravat. Here he goes! Look at him,
+all ye pure-hearted young men, and see the work of the fashionable
+club-room. I knew one such who, after the contaminations of his
+club-house, leaped out of the third-story window to put an end to his
+wretchedness.
+
+Many who would not be seen drinking at the bar of a restaurant, think
+there is no dishonor and no peril connected with sitting down at a
+marble stand in an elegantly furnished parlor, to which they go with a
+private key, and where none are present except gentlemen as elegant
+as themselves. Everything so chaste in the surroundings! Soft carpets,
+beautiful pictures, cut glass, Italian top tables, frescoed walls. In
+just such places there are thousands of young men, middle-aged men,
+and old men, preparing themselves for overthrow.
+
+In many of these club-rooms the talk is not as pure and elevated as
+it might be. How is it, men and brothers, at half-past eleven o'clock,
+when the tankards are well emptied, and the smoke curls up from every
+lip? Do they ever swear? Are there stories told unworthy a man who
+venerates the name of his mother? Does God, whose presence cannot be
+hindered by bolt, and who comes in without a pass-word, and is making
+up His record for the judgment-day, approve of the blasphemies you
+utter?
+
+You think that there is no special danger, yet acknowledge that you
+have felt _queer_ sometimes. Your head was not right, and your stomach
+was disturbed. I will tell you what was the matter. _You were drunk_.
+You understood not that protracted hiccough; it was the drunkard's
+hiccough. You could not explain that nausea; it was the drunkard's
+vomit. The fact is that some of you, who have never in your own eyes
+or in the eyes of others fully sacrificed your respectability, have
+for six months been written down in God's book as drunkards.
+
+How far down need a man go before he becomes an inebriate? Must he
+fall into the ditch? No! Must he get into a porter-house fight? No!
+Must he be senseless in the street? Must he have the delirium
+tremens? No! He may wear satin and fine linen; he may walk with hat
+scrupulously brushed; may swing a gold-headed cane, and step in boots
+of French leather, dismount from a carriage, or draw tight rein over
+a swift, sleek, high-mettled, full-blooded Arabian span, but yet be
+so thoroughly under the power of strong drink that he is utterly
+offensive to his Maker and rotten as a heap of compost.
+
+The fact that this whole land to-day swelters with drunkenness I
+charge upon the drinking club houses. They wield an influence that
+makes it respectable, and I will not put my head to the pillow
+to-night until I have written against them one burning anathema
+maranatha! When I see them dragging down scores of our young men, and
+slaying professed Christians at the very altar, and snatching off
+the garlands of life from those who would otherwise reign forever and
+forever, I tell you I hate them with a perfect hatred, and pray for
+more height, and depth, and length, and breadth of capacity with which
+to hate them.
+
+Along this blossoming and over-arched pathway, and through this long
+line of temptations that throw their garlands upon the brow, and ring
+their music into the ear, go a great host.
+
+No one can estimate the homes that have been shattered by the
+dissipations of the club-house. There are weak women who would never
+consent to a husband's absence in the evening, however important the
+duty that takes him away. Any man who wishes to take his share of the
+public burdens and is willing to work for the political, educational,
+and social advancement of the community must of necessity spend some
+of his evenings away from home. There are associations and churches
+that have a right to demand a share of a man's presence and means, and
+that is a weak woman who always looks offended when her husband goes
+out in the evening.
+
+But club-houses become a pest when they demand all a man's evenings;
+and that is a result we are called to deplore. Every head of a
+household is called to be its educator, its companion, its religious
+instructor and exemplar; not only to furnish the wardrobe and to make
+the money to pay the bills when they come in, but to give his
+highest intellectual energies and social faculties to the amusement,
+instruction, and improvement of the household.
+
+But I describe the history of thousands of households when I say that
+the tea is rapidly taken, and while yet the family linger the father
+shoves back his chair, has "an engagement," lights his cigar and
+starts out, not returning until after midnight. That is the history of
+three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, except when he is sick
+and cannot get out.
+
+How about home duties? Have you fulfilled all your vows? Would your
+wife ever have married you with such a prospect? Wait until your sons
+get to be sixteen or seventeen years of age, and they too will shove
+back from the tea-table, have an "engagement," light their cigars, go
+over to their club-houses, their night-key rattling in your door after
+midnight--the effect of your example. And as your son's constitution
+may not be as strong as yours, and the liquor he drinks more terribly
+drugged, he will catch up with you on the road to death although you
+got the start of him. And so you will both go to hell together! A
+revolving Drummond-light on the front of a locomotive casts its gleam
+through the darkness as it is turned around; so I catch up the lamp of
+God's truth and turn it round until its tremendous glare flashes into
+all the club-houses of our cities.
+
+Flee the presence of the dissipating club-houses. "Paid your money?"
+Sacrifice that rather than your soul. "Good fellows," are they? They
+cannot stay what they are under such influences. Mollusca live two
+hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag grows
+fat on the stunted growth of Altaian peaks. The Hedysarium thrives
+amid the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the
+hot lips of volcanic Schneehalten. But good character and a useful
+life thrive amid club-room dissipations--_Never!_
+
+The best way to make a wild beast cower is to look him in the eye, but
+the best way to treat the temptations I have described is to turn your
+back and fly! O! my heart aches! I see men struggling to get out of
+the serfdom of bad habits, and I want to help them. I have knelt with
+them and heard their cry for help. I have had them put one hand
+on each of my shoulders, and look me in the eye, with an agony of
+earnestness that the judgment shall have no power to make me forget,
+and from their lips, scorched with the fires of ruin, have heard
+them cry "God help me!" There is no rescue for such, save in the Lord
+Almighty.
+
+Well, what we do, we had better do right away. The clock ticks now and
+we hear it. After a while the clock will tick and we shall not hear
+it. Seated by a country fireside, I saw the fire kindle, blaze, and go
+out. I gathered up from the hearth enough for profitable reflections.
+Our life is just like the fire on that hearth. We put on fresh fagots,
+and the fire bursts through and up, and out, gay of flash, gay of
+crackle--emblem of boyhood. Then the fire reddens into coals. The
+heat is fiercer; and the more it is stirred, the more it reddens. With
+sweep of flame it cleaves its way, until all the hearth glows with
+the intensity--emblem of full manhood. Then comes a whiteness to the
+coals. The heat lessens. The flickering shadows have died along the
+wall. The fagots drop apart. The household hover over the expiring
+embers. The last breath of smoke has been lost in the chimney. Fire is
+out. Shovel up the white remains. ASHES!
+
+
+
+
+FLASK, BOTTLE, AND DEMIJOHN.
+
+
+[NOTE.--This chapter, in its first shape, was given some currency
+under the title of "The Evil Beast." I have, however, so revised and
+added to that Lecture, that, as here given, it is essentially a new
+presentation of the dreadful Abomination of Rum, and it is in
+this present shape that I wish the public to receive it as a full
+expression of my views thereon. T.D.W.T.]
+
+There has in all ages and climes been a tendency to the improper use
+of stimulants. Noah, as if disgusted with the prevalence of water in
+his time, took to strong drink. By this vice Alexander the Conqueror
+was conquered. The Romans, at their feasts, fell off their seats with
+intoxication. Four hundred millions of our race are opium-eaters.
+India, Turkey, and China have groaned with the desolation; and by it
+have been quenched such lights as Haller and De Quincey. One hundred
+millions are the victims of the betel-nut, which has specially
+accursed the East Indies. Three hundred millions chew hashish, and
+Persia, Brazil, and Africa suffer the delirium. The Tartars employ
+murowa; the Mexicans the agave; the people of Guarapo an intoxicating
+quality taken from sugar-cane; while a great multitude, that no man
+can number, are the disciples of alcohol. To it they bow. In its
+trenches they fall. In its awful prison they are incarcerated. On its
+ghastly holocaust they burn.
+
+Could the muster-roll of this great army be called, and they could
+come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering
+putrefaction and beastliness! What heart could endure the groans of
+agony!
+
+Drunkenness: Does it not jingle the burglar's key? Does it not whet
+the assassin's knife? Does it not cock the highwayman's pistol? Does
+it not wave the incendiary's torch? Has it not sent the physician
+reeling into the sick-room; and the minister, with his tongue thick,
+into the pulpit? Did not an exquisite poet, from the very height of
+reputation, fall, a gibbering sot, into the gutter, on his way to be
+married to one of the fairest daughters of New England, and at the
+very hour when the bride was decking herself for the altar; and did he
+not die of delirium tremens, almost unattended, in a New York hotel?
+Tamerlane asked for one hundred and sixty thousand skulls, with which
+to build a pyramid to his own honor. He got the skulls, and built the
+pyramid. But if the bones of all those who have fallen as a prey to
+dissipation could be piled up, it would make a monster pyramid. Talk
+not of Waterloo and Austerlitz, for they were not fields of blood
+compared with this great Golgotha.
+
+Who will gird himself for the journey, and try with me to scale this
+mountain of the dead--going up miles high on human carcasses, to find
+still other peaks far above, mountain above mountain, white with the
+bleached bones of drunkards!
+
+Hang not your head or shut your eyes until we have seen it. We must
+get a sight at the monster before we can shoot him.
+
+I will begin at our national and State capitals. Like government,
+like people. Henry VIII. blasts all England with his example of
+uncleanness. Catharine of Russia drags down a whole empire with her
+nefarious behavior. No Christian man can be indifferent to what
+every hour of every day goes on at Washington. While the Presidential
+Impeachment trial advanced, some of the men who were to render their
+solemn verdict on the subject were reeling in and out of the Senate
+chamber,--the intoxicated representatives of a free Christian people.
+It was a great question whether several members of that high court
+could be got sober in time to vote.
+
+Only recently a Senator from New England rises up with tongue so
+thick, and with utterance so nonsensical, that he is led into the
+anteroom. He was a good "Republican."
+
+One of the Middle States has a representative who very rarely appears
+in his seat, for the reason that he is so great an inebriate that he
+can neither walk nor ride. He is a good Democrat.
+
+As God looks down on our State and national legislatures, he holds us
+responsible. We cast the votes. We lift up the legislators.
+
+Will the time never come when this nation shall rise up higher than
+partisanship, and cast its suffrage for sober men?
+
+The fact is that the two millions of dollars which the liquor dealers
+raised for the purpose of swaying State and national legislation has
+done its work, and the nation is debauched. Higher than legislatures
+or the Congress of the United States is the Whiskey Ring!
+
+The Sabbath has been sacrificed to the rum traffic. To many of our
+people the best day of the week is the worst. Bakers must keep their
+shops closed on the Sabbath. It is dangerous to have loaves of bread
+going out on Sunday. The shoe-store is closed; severe penalty will
+attack the man who sells boots on the Sabbath. But down with the
+window-shutters of the grog shops. Our laws shall confer particular
+honors upon the rum traffickers. All other traders must stand aside
+for these. Let our citizens who have disgraced themselves by trading
+in clothing, and hosiery, and hardware, and lumber, and coal, take
+off their hats to the rum-seller, elected to particular honor. It is
+unsafe for any other class of men to be allowed license for Sunday
+work. But swing out your signs, oh ye traffickers in the peace of
+families, and in the souls of immortal men! Let the corks fly, and the
+beer foam, and the rum go tearing down the half-consumed throat of the
+inebriate. God does not see, does he? Judgment will never come, will
+it?
+
+People say--"Let us have some law to correct this evil." We have more
+law now than we execute. In what city is there a mayoralty that dare
+do it? There is no advantage in having the law higher than public
+opinion. What would be the use of the Maine Law in New York? Neal Dow,
+the Mayor of Portland, came out with a _posse_ and threw the rum of
+the city into the street. From the alms-house a woman came out and
+said, "Oh! if this had only been done ten years ago, my husband would
+not have died a drunkard, and I would not have been a widow in the
+almshouse."
+
+But there are not enough police in the city of New York to stand by
+its Mayor in such an undertaking; public opinion is not educated.
+
+I do not know but that God is determined to let drunkards triumph; and
+the husbands and sons of thousands of our best families be destroyed
+by this vice, in order that our people, amazed and indignant, may rise
+up and demand the extermination of this municipal crime.
+
+There is a way of driving down the hoops of a barrel until the hoops
+break.
+
+We are in this country, at this time, trying to regulate this evil
+by a tax on whiskey. You might as well try to regulate the Asiatic
+cholera, or the small-pox, by taxation. The men who distil liquors
+are, for the most part, unscrupulous; and the higher the tax, the more
+inducement to illicit distillation. New York produces forty thousand
+gallons of whiskey every twenty-four hours; and the most of it escapes
+the tax. The most vigilant officials fail to discover the cellars, and
+vaults, and sheds where this work is done.
+
+Oh, the folly of trying to restrain an evil by government tariffs! If
+every gallon of whiskey made, if every flask of wine produced, should
+be taxed a thousand dollars, it would not be enough to pay for the
+tears it has wrung out of the eyes of widows and orphans, nor for the
+blood it has dashed on the altars of the Christian Church, nor for the
+catastrophe of the millions it has destroyed forever.
+
+Oh! we are a Christian people! From Boston a ship sailed for
+Africa, with three missionaries, and twenty-two thousand gallons
+of New-England rum on board. Which will have the most effect: the
+missionaries, or the rum?
+
+Rum is victor. Some time when you have leisure, just go down any
+of our streets, and count the number of drinking places. Here they
+are--first-class hotels. Marble floors. Counter polished. Fine picture
+hanging over the decanters. Cut glass. Silver water-coolers. Pictured
+punch-bowls. High-priced liquors. Customers pull off their gloves,
+and take up the glasses, and click them, and with immaculate
+pocket handkerchief wipe their mouth, and go up-stairs, or into the
+reading-room, and complete extensive bargains.
+
+Here it is--the restaurant. All sorts of viands, but chiefly all
+styles of beverage. They who frequent this place have fairly started
+on the down grade. Having drunk once, they lounge at the corner of the
+bar until a friend comes up, and then the beverage is repeated. After
+a while they sit at the little table by the wall and order a rarer
+wine; for they feel richer now, and able to get almost anything.
+Towards bed-time they take out their watch and say they must go home.
+They start, but cannot stand straight. With a gentleman at each arm,
+they start up the street. More and more overcome, the man begins to
+whoop, and shout, and swear, and refuse to go any farther. Hat falls
+off. Hair gets over his eyes. Door-bell of fine house rings. Wife
+comes down the stairs. Daughters look over the banisters. Sobbing in
+the dark hall. Quick--shut the front door, for I do not want to look
+in. God help them!
+
+Here it is--a wine-cellar. Going into the door are depraved men and
+lost women. Some stagger. All blaspheme. Men with rings in their ears
+instead of their nose; and blotches of breast-pin. Pictures on the
+wall cut out of the _Police Gazette_. A slush of beer on floor and
+counter. A pistol falls out of a ruffian's pocket. By the gas-light a
+knife flashes. Low songs. They banter, and jeer, and howl, and vomit.
+An awful goal, to which hundreds of people better than you have come.
+
+All these different styles of drinking-places are multiplying. They
+smite a young man's vision at every turn. They pour the stench of
+their abomination on every wave of air.
+
+I sketch two houses in this street. The first is bright as home can
+be. The father comes at nightfall, and the children run out to meet
+him. Luxuriant evening meal, gratulation, and sympathy, and laughter.
+Music in the parlor. Fine pictures on the wall. Costly books on the
+stand. Well-clad household. Plenty of everything to make home happy.
+
+House the second. Piano sold yesterday by the sheriff. Wife's furs at
+pawnbroker's shop. Clock gone. Daughter's jewelry sold to get flour.
+Carpets gone off the floor. Daughters in faded and patched dresses.
+Wife sewing for the stores. Little child with an ugly wound on her
+face, struck in an angry blow. Deep shadow of wretchedness falling in
+every room. Doorbell rings. Little children hide. Daughters turn
+pale. Wife holds her breath. Blundering steps in the hall. Door opens.
+Fiend, brandishing his fist, cries--"Out! Out! What are you doing
+here!"
+
+Did I call this house the second? No; it is the same house. Rum
+transformed it. Rum imbruted the man. Rum sold the shawl. Rum tore
+up the carpets. Rum shook its fist. Rum desolated the hearth. _Rum_
+changed that paradise into a hell!
+
+I sketch two men that you know very well. The first graduated from one
+of our literary institutions. His father, mother, brothers and sisters
+were present to see him graduate. They heard the applauding thunders
+that greeted his speech. They saw the bouquets tossed to his feet.
+They saw the degree conferred and the diploma given. He never looked
+so well. Everybody said, "What a noble brow! What a fine eye! What
+graceful manners! What brilliant prospects!" All the world opens
+before him and cries, "Hurrah! Hurrah!"
+
+Man the second. Lies in the station-house to-night. The doctor has
+just been sent for to bind up the gashes received in a fight. His hair
+is matted, and makes him look like a wild beast. His lip is bloody and
+cut.
+
+Who is the battered and bruised wretch that was picked up by the
+police and carried in drunk, and foul, and bleeding? Did I call
+him man the second? He is man the _first_! Rum transformed him. Rum
+destroyed his prospects. Rum disappointed parental expectation. Rum
+withered those garlands of commencement-day. Rum cut his lip. Rum
+dashed out his manhood. RUM, accursed RUM!
+
+This foul thing gives one swing to its scythe, and our best merchants
+fall; their stores are sold, and they slink into dishonored graves.
+
+Again it swings its scythe, and some of our best physicians fall into
+sufferings that their wisest prescriptions cannot cure.
+
+Again it swings its scythe, and ministers of the gospel fall from the
+heights of Zion with long-resounding crash of ruin and shame.
+
+Some of your own household have already been shaken. Perhaps you
+can hardly admit it; but where was your son last night? Where was he
+Friday night? Where was he Thursday night? Wednesday night? Tuesday
+night? Monday night?
+
+Nay, have not some of you, in your own bodies, felt the power of this
+habit? You think that you could stop? Are you sure you could? Go on
+a little further, and I am sure you cannot. I think, if some of you
+should try to break away, you would find a chain on the right wrist,
+and one on the left; one on the right foot, and another on the left.
+This serpent does not begin to hurt until it has wound around and
+round. Then it begins to tighten, and strangle, and crush until the
+bones crack, and the blood trickles, and the eyes start from their
+sockets, and the mangled wretch cries "O God! O God! Help! Help!" But
+it is too late; and nothing but the fires of woe can melt the chain
+when once it is fully fastened.
+
+The child of a drunkard died. My friend, a minister of the Gospel, sat
+in a carriage with the drunkard, and the coffin of the little child.
+On the way to the grave, the drunkard put his hand on the lid of his
+child's coffin and swore that he never would drink again. Before the
+next morning had come he was dead drunk!
+
+I spread out before you the starvation, the cruelty, the ghastliness,
+the woes, the terror, the anguish, the perdition of this evil, and
+then ask, Are you ready, fully and forever, to surrender our churches,
+our homes, our civilization, our glorious Christianity? One or the
+other must surrender. It can be no "drawn battle."
+
+But how are we to contend?
+
+First, by getting our children right on this subject. Let them grow up
+with an utter aversion to strong drink. Take care how you administer
+it even as medicine. If you find that they have a natural love for
+it, as some have, put in a glass of it some horrid stuff and make it
+utterly nauseous. Teach them as faithfully as you do the catechism,
+that rum is a fiend. Take them to the alms-house and show them the
+wreck and ruin it works. Walk with them into the homes that have been
+scourged by it. If a drunkard hath fallen into a ditch, take them
+right up where they can see his face, bruised, savage and swollen, and
+say, "Look, my son: Rum did that!"
+
+Looking out of your window at some one who, intoxicated to madness,
+goes through the street, brandishing his fist, blaspheming God,--a
+howling, defying, shouting, reeling, raving and foaming maniac,--say
+to your son, "Look; that man was once a child like you." As you go by
+the grog-shop, let your boy know that that is the place where men are
+slain, and their wives made paupers, and their children slaves. Hold
+out to your children all warnings, all rewards, all counsels, lest in
+after days they break your heart, and curse your gray hairs.
+
+A man laughed at my father for his scrupulous temperance principles,
+and said--"I am more liberal than you. I always give my children the
+sugar in the glass after we have been taking a drink."
+
+Three of his sons have died drunkards; and the fourth is imbecile
+through intemperate habits.
+
+Again, we will battle this evil at the ballot-box. How many men are
+there who can rise above the feelings of partisanship, and demand that
+our officials shall be sober men?
+
+I maintain that the question of sobriety is higher than the question
+of availability; and that however eminent a man's services may be, if
+he have habits of intoxication, he is unfit for any office in the gift
+of a Christian people. Our laws will be no better than the men who
+make them.
+
+Spend a few days at Harrisburg, or Albany, or Washington, and you will
+find out why, upon these subjects, it is impossible to get righteous
+enactments.
+
+Again, we will war upon this evil by organized societies. The
+friends of the rum traffic have banded together; annually issue their
+circulars; raise fabulous sums of money to advance their interests;
+and by grips, pass-words, signs, and stratagems set at defiance public
+morals. Let us confront them with organizations just as secret,
+and, if need be, with grips, and pass-words, and signs maintain our
+position. There is no need that our philanthropic societies tell all
+their plans.
+
+I am in favor of all lawful strategy in the carrying on of this
+conflict. I wish to God we could lay under the wine-casks a train,
+which, once ignited, would shake the earth with the explosion of this
+monstrous iniquity.
+
+Again: we will try the power of the pledge. There are thousands of men
+who have been saved by putting their names to such a document. I know
+it is laughed at; but there are men who, having once promised a thing,
+do it. "Some have broken the pledge." Yes; they were liars. But all
+men are not liars. I do not say that it is the duty of all persons
+to make such signature; but I do say that it will be the salvation of
+many of you.
+
+The glorious work of Theobald Mathew can never be estimated. At
+his hand four millions of people took the pledge, including eight
+prelates, and seven hundred of the Roman Catholic clergy. A multitude
+of them were faithful.
+
+Dr. Justin Edwards said that ten thousand drunkards had been
+permanently reformed in five years.
+
+Through the great Washingtonian movement in Ohio, sixty thousand took
+the pledge. In Pennsylvania, twenty-nine thousand. In Kentucky, thirty
+thousand, and multitudes in all parts of the land. Many of these had
+been habitual drunkards. One hundred and fifty thousand of them, it is
+estimated, were permanently reclaimed. Two of these men became foreign
+ministers; one a governor of a State; several were sent to
+Congress. Hartford reported six hundred reformed drunkards; Norwich,
+seventy-two; Fairfield, fifty; Sheffield, seventy-five. All over the
+land reformed men were received back into the churches that they had
+before disgraced; and households were re-established. All up and
+down the land there were gratulations, and praise to God. The pledge
+signed, to thousands has been the proclamation of emancipation.
+
+I think that we are coming at last to treat inebriation as it ought to
+be treated, namely, as an awful disease, self-inflicted, to be sure,
+but nevertheless a disease. Once fastened upon a man, sermons will not
+cure him; temperance lectures will not eradicate the taste; religious
+tracts will not remove it; the Gospel of Christ will not arrest it.
+Once under the power of this awful thirst, the man is bound to go on;
+and if the foaming glass were on the other side of perdition, he would
+wade through the fires of hell to get it. A young man in prison had
+such a strong thirst for intoxicating liquors, that he cut off his
+hand at the wrist, called for a bowl of brandy in order to stop the
+bleeding, thrust his wrist into the bowl, and then drank the contents.
+
+Stand not, when the thirst is on him, between a man and his cups!
+Clear the track for him! Away with the children: he would tread their
+life out! Away with the wife: he would dash her to death! Away with
+the Cross: he would run it down! Away with the Bible: he would tear
+it up for the winds! Away with heaven: he considers it worthless as a
+straw! "Give me the drink! Give it to me! Though hands of blood pass
+up the bowl, and the soul trembles over the pit,--the drink! give it
+to me! Though it be pale with tears; though the froth of everlasting
+anguish float in the foam--give it to me! I drink to my wife's woe; to
+my children's rags; to my eternal banishment from God, and hope, and
+heaven! Give it to me! the drink!"
+
+Again: we will contend against these evils by trying to persuade
+the respectable classes of society to the banishment of alcoholic
+beverages. You who move in elegant and refined associations; you
+who drink the best liquors; you who never drink until you lose
+your balance: consider that you have, under God, in your power the
+redemption of this land from drunkenness. Empty your cellars and
+wine-closets of the beverage, and then come out and give us your hand,
+your vote, your prayers, your sympathies. Do that, and I will promise
+three things: First, That you will find unspeakable happiness in
+having done your duty; secondly, you will probably save somebody,
+perhaps your own child; thirdly, you will not, in your last hour, have
+a regret that you made the sacrifice, if sacrifice it be.
+
+As long as you make drinking respectable, drinking customs will
+prevail; and the ploughshare of death, drawn by terrible disasters,
+will go on turning up this whole continent, from end to end, with the
+long, deep, awful furrow of drunkards' graves.
+
+Oh, how this Rum Fiend would like to go and hang up a skeleton in your
+beautiful house, so that when you opened the front door to go in you
+would see it in the hall; and when you sit at your table you would see
+it hanging from the wall; and when you open your bed-room you would
+find it stretched upon your pillow; and waking at night you would feel
+its cold hand passing over your face and pinching at your heart!
+
+There is no home so beautiful but it may be devastated by the awful
+curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it
+that silenced Sheridan's voice and shattered the golden sceptre with
+which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the
+sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless ballad? What brought
+down the majestic form of one who awed the American Senate with his
+eloquence, and after a while carried him home dead drunk from the
+office of Secretary of State? What was it that crippled the noble
+spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, until the other night,
+in a drunken fit, he reeled from the deck of a Western steamer and was
+drowned! There was one whose voice we all loved to hear. He was one of
+the most classic orators of the century. People wondered why a man
+of so pure a heart and so excellent a life should have such a sad
+countenance always. They knew not that his wife was a sot.
+
+"Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink!" If this curse was
+proclaimed about the comparatively harmless drinks of olden times,
+what condemnation must rest upon those who tempt their neighbors
+when intoxicating liquor means copperas, nux vomica, logwood, opium,
+sulphuric acid, vitriol, turpentine, and strychnine! "Pure liquors:"
+pure destruction! Nearly all the genuine champagne made is taken by
+the courts of Europe. What we get is horrible swill!
+
+I call upon woman for her influence in the matter. Many a man who had
+reformed and resolved on a life of sobriety has been pitched off into
+old habits by the delicate hand of her whom he was anxious to please.
+
+Bishop Potter says that a young man who had been reformed sat at a
+table, and when the wine was passed to him refused to take it. A lady
+sitting at his side said, "Certainly you will not refuse to take a
+glass with me?" Again he refused. But when she had derided him for
+lack of manliness he took the glass and drank it. He took another and
+another; and putting his fist hard down on the table, said, "Now I
+drink until I die." In a few months his ruin was consummated.
+
+I call upon those who are guilty of these indulgences to quit the path
+of death. O what a change it would make in your home! Do you see how
+everything there is being desolated! Would you not like to bring back
+joy to your wife's heart, and have your children come out to meet you
+with as much confidence as once they showed? Would you not like to
+rekindle the home lights that long ago were extinguished? It is not
+too late to change. It may not entirely obliterate from your soul the
+memory of wasted years and a ruined reputation, nor smooth out from
+anxious brows the wrinkles which trouble has ploughed. It may not call
+back unkind words uttered or rough deeds done--for perhaps in those
+awful moments you struck her! It may not take from your memory the
+bitter thoughts connected with some little grave: but it is not too
+late to save yourself and secure for God and your family the remainder
+of your fast-going life.
+
+But perhaps you have not utterly gone astray. I may address one who
+may not have quite made up his mind. Let your better nature speak out.
+You take one side or the other in the war against drunkenness.
+Have you the courage to put your foot down right, and say to your
+companions and friends: "I will never drink intoxicating liquor in all
+my life, nor will I countenance the habit in others." Have nothing to
+do with strong drink. It has turned the earth into a place of skulls,
+and has stood opening the gate to a lost world to let in its victims,
+until now the door swings no more upon its hinges, but day and night
+stands wide open to let in the agonized procession of doomed men.
+
+Do I address one whose regular work in life is to administer to this
+appetite? I beg you--get out of the business. If a woe be pronounced
+upon the man who gives his neighbor drink, how many woes must be
+hanging over the man who does this every day, and every hour of the
+day!
+
+A philanthropist, going up to the counter of a grog-shop, as the
+proprietor was mixing a drink for a toper standing at the counter,
+said to the proprietor, "Can you tell me what your business is good
+for?" The proprietor, with an infernal laugh, said, "_It fattens
+graveyards!_"
+
+God knows better than you do yourself the number of drinks you have
+poured out. You keep a list; but a more accurate list has been kept
+than yours. You may call it Burgundy, Bourbon, Cognac, Heidsick, Hock;
+God calls it strong drink. Whether you sell it in low oyster cellar or
+behind the polished counter of first-class hotel, the divine curse is
+upon you. I tell you plainly that you will meet your customers one day
+when there will be no counter between you. When your work is done on
+earth, and you enter the reward of your business, all the souls of
+the men whom you have destroyed will crowd around you and pour their
+bitterness into your cup. They will show you their wounds and say,
+"You made them;" and point to their unquenchable thirst, and say, "You
+kindled it;" and rattle their chain and say, "You forged it." Then
+their united groans will smite your ears; and with the hands out of
+which you once picked the sixpences and the dimes, they will push you
+off the verge of great precipices; while, rolling up from beneath, and
+breaking among the crags of death, will thunder:
+
+"_Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink!_"
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF BLACKNESS OF DARKNESS.
+
+
+Men like to hear the frailties and faults of others chastised. With
+what blandness and placidity they sit and hear the religious teacher
+excoriate the ambition of Ahab, the treachery of Judas, the treason
+of Athaliah, and the wickedness of the Amalekites. Indeed, I have
+sometimes felt sorry for the Amalekites, for in all ages, and on all
+occasions, they are smitten, denounced, and pursued. They have had
+their full share of censure and excoriation. It is high time that
+in our addresses in pulpits, and in domestic circles, we turn our
+attention to the driving out of these worse Amalekites which are
+swarming in society to-day, thicker than in the olden time. The
+ancient Amalekites lived for one or two hundred years; but these
+are not weakened after a thousand years. Those traversed only a few
+leagues of land; these stalk the earth and ford the sea. Those had
+each a sword or spear; these fight with a million swords, and strike
+with a million stings, and smite with a million catastrophes. Those
+were conquered with human weapons; but to overcome these we must bring
+out God's great fieldpieces, and employ an enginery that can sweep
+from eternity to eternity.
+
+There is one subject which we are expected, in all our teachings, to
+shun, or only to hint at: I mean the wickedness of an impure life.
+Though God thunders against this appalling iniquity from the heavens
+curse after curse, anathema after anathema, by our unwillingness to
+repeat the divine utterance we seem to say, "Lord, not so loud! Speak
+about everything else; but if this keeps on there will be trouble!"
+Meanwhile the foundations of social life are being slowly undermined;
+and many of the upper circles of life have putrefied until they have
+no more power to rot.
+
+If a fox or a mink come down to the farmyard and carry off a chicken,
+the whole family join in the search.
+
+If a panther come down into the village and carry off a child, the
+whole neighborhood go out with clubs and guns to bring it down.
+
+But this monster-crime goes forth, carrying off body and soul; and
+yet, if we speak, a thousand voices bid us be silent.
+
+I shall try to cut to the vitals of the subject, and proceed with the
+_post-mortem_ of this carcass of death. It is time to speak on this
+subject. All the indignation of the community upon this subject is
+hurled upon woman's head. If, in an evil hour, she sacrifice her
+honor, the whole city goes howling after her. She shall take the whole
+blame. Out with her from all decent circles! Whip her. Flay her.
+Bar all the doors of society against her return. Set on her all the
+blood-hounds. Shove her off precipice after precipice. Push her down.
+Kick her out! If you see her struggling on the waves, and with her
+blood-tipped fingers clinging to the verge of respectability, drop a
+mill-stone on her head.
+
+For a woman's sin, men have no mercy; and the heart of other women is
+more cruel than death.
+
+For her, in the dark hour of her calamity, the women who, with the
+same temptation, might have fallen into deeper damnation, have no
+commiseration and no prayer.
+
+The heaviest stroke that comes down upon a fallen woman's soul is the
+merciless indignation of her sisters.
+
+If the multitudes of the fallen could be placed in a straight line, it
+would reach from here to the gates of the lost, and back again.
+
+But what of the destroyer?
+
+We take his arm. We flatter his appearance. We take off our hats.
+He is admitted to our parlors. For him we cast our votes. For him
+we speak our eulogies. And when he has gone we read over the heap of
+compost: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They rest from
+their labors and their works do follow them."
+
+In the fashionable city to-day there walk a thousand libertines. They
+are a moving pest. Their breath is the sirocco of the desert. Their
+bones have in them the decay of the pit. They have the eye of
+a basilisk. They have been soaked in filth, and steeped in
+uncleanliness, and consumed in sin, and they are all adrip with the
+loathsomeness of eternal death. I take hold of the robe of one of
+these elegant gentlemen, and pull it aside, and say, "Behold a Leper!"
+
+First, if you desire to shun this evil, you will have nothing to do
+with bad books and impure newspapers. With such an affluent literature
+as is coming forth from our swift-revolving printing-presses, there
+is no excuse for dragging one's self through sewers of unchastity. Why
+walk in the ditch, when right beside the ditch is the solid flagging?
+It seems that in the literature of the day the ten plagues of Egypt
+have returned, and the frogs and lice have hopped and skipped over our
+parlor tables.
+
+Waiting impatiently in the house of some parishioner, for the
+completion of a very protracted toilet, I have picked up a book from
+the parlor table, and found that every leaf was a scale of leprosy.
+
+Parents are delighted to have their children read, but they should be
+sure as to what they read. You do not have to walk a day or two in an
+infected district to get the cholera or typhoid fever; and one wave
+of moral unhealth will fever and blast an immortal nature. Perhaps,
+knowing not what you did, you read a bad book. Do you not remember it
+altogether? Yes; and perhaps you will never get over it.
+
+However strong and exalted your character, _never read a bad book_. By
+the time you get through the first chapter you will see the drift; If
+you find the marks of the hoofs of the devil in the pictures, or in
+the style, or in the plot, away with it. You may tear your coat, or
+break a vase, and repair them again, but the point where the rip or
+fracture took place will always be evident. It takes less than an
+hour to do your heart a damage which no time can entirely repair. Look
+carefully over your child's library; see what book it is that he reads
+after he has gone to bed, with the gas turned upon the pillow. Do
+not always take it for granted that a book is good because it is
+a Sunday-school book. As far as possible know _who_ wrote it, who
+illustrated it, who published it, who sold it.
+
+Young man, as you value Heaven, never buy a book from one of those men
+who meet you in the square, and, after looking both ways, to see
+if the police are watching, shows you a book--very cheap. Have
+him arrested as you would kill a rattle-snake. Grab him, and shout
+"Police! police!"
+
+But there is more danger, I think, from many of the family papers,
+published once a week; in those stories of vice and shame, full
+of infamous suggestions, going as far as they can without exposing
+themselves to the clutch of the law. I name none of them; but say that
+on some fashionable tables there lie "family newspapers" that are the
+very vomit of the pit.
+
+The way to ruin is cheap. It costs three dollars to go to
+Philadelphia; six dollars to Boston; thirty-three dollars to Savannah;
+but, by the purchase of a bad paper for ten cents, you may get a
+through ticket to hell, by express, with few stopping-places, and
+the final halting like the tumbling of the lightning train down the
+draw-bridge at Norwalk--sudden, terrific, deathful, never to rise.
+
+O, the power of an iniquitous pen! If a needle puncture the body at a
+certain point, life is destroyed; but the pen is a sharper instrument,
+for with its puncture you may kill the soul. And that very thing many
+of our acutest minds are to-day doing. Do not think that this which
+you drain from the glass, because it is sweet, is therefore healthful:
+some of the worst poisons are pleasant to the taste. The pen which
+for the time fascinates you may be dipped in the slime of unclean
+literature.
+
+Look out for the books that come from France. It has sent us some
+grand histories, poems, and pure novels, but they are few in number
+compared with the nastiness that it has spewed out upon our shore.
+
+Do we not read in our Bibles that the ancient flood covered all the
+earth? I would have thought that France had escaped, for it does not
+seem as if it had ever had a thorough washing.
+
+In the next place, if you would shun an impure life, avoid those who
+indulge in impure conversation. There are many people whose chief
+mirthfulness is in that line. They are full of innuendo, and phrases
+of double meaning, and are always picking out of the conversation of
+decent men something vilely significant. It is astonishing in company,
+how many, professing to be _Christians_, will tell vile stories; and
+that some Christian women, in their own circles, have no hesitation at
+the same style of talking.
+
+You take a step down hill, when, without resistance, you allow any one
+to put into your ear a vile innuendo. If, forgetting who you are,
+any man attempts to say such things in your presence, let your
+better nature assert itself, look the offender full in the face, and
+ask--"What do you mean by saying such a thing in my presence!" Better
+allow a man to smite you in the face than to utter such conversation
+before you. I do not care who the men or women are that utter impure
+thoughts; they are guilty of a mighty wrong; and their influence upon
+our young people is baleful.
+
+If in the club where you associate; if in the social circle where you
+move, you hear depraved conversation, fly for your life! A man is
+no better than his talk; and no man can have such interviews without
+being scarred.
+
+I charge our young men against considering uncleanness more tolerable,
+because it is sanctioned by the customs, habits, and practices of
+what is called high life. If this sin wears kid gloves, and patent
+leathers, and coat of exquisite fit, and carries an opera-glass of
+costliest material, and lives in a big house, and rides in a splendid
+turn-out, is it to be any the less reprehended? No! No!
+
+I warn you not so much against the abomination that hides in the lower
+courts and alleys of the town, as against the more damnable vice that
+hides behind the white shutters and brownstone fronts of the upper
+classes.
+
+God, once in a while, hitches up the fiery team of vengeance, and
+ploughs up the splendid libertinism, and we stand aghast.
+
+Sin, crawling out of the ditch of poverty and shame, has but few
+temptations; but, gliding through the glittering drawing-room with
+magnificent robe, it draws the stars of heaven after it.
+
+Poets and painters have represented Satan as horned and hoofed. If I
+were a poet I should describe him with manners polished to the
+last perfection, hair flowing in graceful ringlets, eye a little
+blood-shot, but floating in bewitching languor; hands soft and
+diamonded; step light and artistic; voice mellow as a flute; boot
+elegantly shaped; conversation facile, carefully toned, and Frenchy;
+breath perfumed until it would seem that nothing had ever touched his
+lips save balm and myrrh. But his heart I would encase with the scales
+of a monster, then fill with pride, with beastliness of desire,
+with recklessness, with hypocrisy, with death. Then I would have
+him touched with some rod of disenchantment until his two eyes would
+become the cold orbs of the adder; and on his lip would come the foam
+of raging intoxication; and to his feet the spring of the panther;
+and his soft hand should become the clammy hand of a wasted
+skeleton; while suddenly from his heart would burst in crackling and
+all-devouring fury the unquenchable flames; and in the affected lisp
+of his tongue would come the hiss of the worm that never dies.
+
+But, until disenchanted, nothing but myrrh, and balm, and ringlet, and
+diamond, and flute-like voice, and conversation aromatic, facile, and
+Frenchy.
+
+There are practices in respectable circles, I am told by physicians,
+which need public reprehension. Herod's massacre of the innocents was
+as nothing compared with that of millions and millions by what I shall
+call _ante-natal_ murders. You may escape the grip of the law, because
+the existence of such life was not known by society; but I tell
+you that at last God will shove down on you the avalanche of his
+indignation; and though you may not have wielded knife or pistol in
+your deeds of darkness, yet, in the day when John Wilkes Booth and
+Antony Probst come to judgment, you will have on _your_ brow the brand
+of _murderer_.
+
+Hear me when I repeat, that the practices of high life ought not to
+make sin in your eyes seem tolerable. God is no respecter of persons;
+and robes and rags will stand on the same platform in the day when the
+archangel, with one foot on the sea and the other on the land, swears,
+by Him that liveth forever and ever, that Time shall be no more.
+
+O, it is beautiful to see a young man living a life of purity,
+standing upright where thousands of other young men fall. You will
+move in honorable circles all your days; and some old friend of your
+father will meet you and say: "My son, how glad I am to see you look
+so well. Just like your father, for all the world. I thought you would
+turn out well when I used to hold you on my knee. Do you ever hear
+from the old folks?"
+
+After a while you yourself will be old, and lean quite heavily on your
+cane, and take short steps, and hold the book off to the other side
+of the light. And men will take off their hats in your presence. Your
+body, unharmed by early indulgences, will get weaker, only as the
+sleepy child gets more and more unable to hold up its head, and falls
+back into its mother's lap: so you shall lay yourself down into the
+arms of the Christian's tomb, and on the slab that marks the place
+will be chiselled: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
+God."
+
+But here is a young man who takes the other route. The voices of
+uncleanness charm him away. He reads bad books. Lives in vicious
+circles. Loses the glow from his cheek, the sparkle from his eye, and
+the purity from his soul. The good shun him. Down he goes, little by
+little. They who knew him when he came to town, while yet lingering
+on his head was a pure mother's blessing, and on his lip the dew of a
+pure sister's kiss, now pass him, and nay, "What an awful wreck!"
+His eye bleared with frequent carousals. His cheek bruised in the
+grog-shop fight. His lip swollen with evil indulgences. Look out what
+you say to him. For a trifle he will take your life. Lower down and
+lower down, until, outcast of God and man, he lies in the alms-house,
+a blotch of loathsomeness and pain. Sometimes he calls out for God;
+and then for more drink. Now he prays; now curses. Now laughs as
+fiends laugh. Then bites his nails to the quick. Then runs both hands
+through the shock of hair that hangs about his head--like the mane
+of a wild beast. Then shivers--until the cot shakes--with unutterable
+terror. Then, with uplifted fist, fights back the devils, or clutches
+the serpents that seem winding him in their coil. Then asks for water,
+which is instantly consumed by his cracked lips. Going his round some
+morning, the surgeon finds him dead.
+
+Straighten the limbs. You need not try to comb out or shove back the
+matted locks. Wrap him in a sheet. Put him in a box. Two men will
+carry it down to the wagon at the door. With chalk, write on the top
+of the box the name of the exhausted libertine.
+
+Do you know who it is?
+
+That is _you_, O man, if, yielding to the temptations to an impure
+life, you go out, and perish.
+
+There is a way that seemeth bright, and fair, and beautiful; but the
+end thereof is BLACKNESS OF DARKNESS FOREVER.
+
+
+
+
+THE GUN THAT KICKS OVER THE MAN WHO SHOOTS IT OFF.
+
+
+Blasphemy is a crime that aims at God, but does its chief harm to the
+one that fires it off.
+
+So I compare it to a piece of imperfect firearms to which the marksman
+puts his eye, and, pulling the trigger, by the rebound finds himself
+in the dust.
+
+I tell you a story, Oriental and marvellous. History speaks of the
+richest man in all the East. He had camels, oxen, asses, sheep, and
+what would make any man rich even if he had nothing else--seven sons
+and three daughters. It was the custom of this man's children to
+have family reunions. One day he is at home, thinking of his darling
+children, who are keeping banquet at their elder brother's house.
+Yonder comes a messenger in hot haste, evidently, from his looks,
+bearing evil tidings. Recovering himself sufficiently to speak, he
+says: "The oxen and the asses have been captured by a foraging party
+of Sabeans, and all the servants are butchered except myself." Another
+messenger is coming. He says that the sheep and the shepherds have
+been struck by lightning. Another messenger is coming. He says that
+the Chaldeans have come and captured the camels, and killed all but
+himself. Another messenger, who says: "While thy sons and daughters
+were at the feast, a hurricane struck the corner of the tent, and they
+are all dead!" But his misfortunes are not yet completed. The old man
+is smitten with the elephantiasis, or black leprosy. Tumors from head
+to foot; face distorted; forehead ridged with offensive tubercles;
+eyelashes fall out; nostrils excoriated; voice destroyed; intolerable
+exhalation from the whole body; until, with none to dress his sores,
+he sits down in the ashes, with nothing but broken pieces of pottery
+to use in the surgery of his wounds. At this point, when he needed
+all consolation and encouragement, his wife comes to him, and says,
+virtually: "This is intolerable! Our property gone, our children
+slain, and now this loathsome, disgusting disease is upon you. Why
+don't you swear? Curse God and die!"
+
+But profanity would not have removed one tumor from his agonized body;
+would not have brought to his door one of the captured camels; would
+not have restored any one of the dead children. Swearing would have
+made the pain more unbearable, the pauperism into which he had plunged
+more distressing, the bereavement more excruciating.
+
+And yet, from the swearing and blasphemy with which our land is
+cursed, one would think there were some great advantage to be reaped
+from the practice. There is to-day in all our land no more prevalent
+custom, and no more God-defying abomination, than profane swearing.
+You can hardly walk our streets five minutes without having your ears
+stung and your sensibilities shocked. The drayman swearing at his
+horse; the tinman at his solder; the sewing-girl imprecating her
+tangled thread; the bricklayer cursing at his trowel; the carpenter at
+his plane; the sailor at the tackling; the merchant at the customer;
+the customer at the merchant; the printer at the miserable proofsheet;
+the accountant at the troublesome line of figures;--swearing in the
+cellar and in the loft, before the counter and behind the counter, in
+the shop and on the street, in low saloon and fashionable bar-room.
+Children swear, men swear, ladies (!) swear. Profanity from the lowest
+haunt calling upon the Almighty, to the fashionable "O Lord!" of the
+glittering drawing-room.
+
+This whole country is blasted with the evil. Coming from the West,
+a gentleman sat behind two persons conversing. Profanities were so
+frequent in the conversation of the two persons in front, that the
+gentleman behind took out his pencil and paper and made a record. The
+profanities filled several sheets in the course of two days, at the
+close of which time the gentleman handed the manuscript to the persons
+conversing. The men said: "Is it possible that we have uttered so
+many profanities in the course of two days?" The gentleman said:
+"Yes."--"Then," said one of the men, "I shall never swear again."
+
+I make no abstract discussion. I hate abstractions. I had rather come
+right out and have a talk with you about a habit that you admit to be
+wrong. This habit has grown from the fact that the young often think
+it an evidence of manliness. There are thousands of boys and youth
+who indulge in it. I hear children along the street, but just able to
+walk, practising this iniquity. They cannot talk straight, but they
+get enough distinctness to let you know that they are damning their
+own souls and the souls of others. Oh! it is horrible to see a little
+child, the first time it lifts its feet to walk, set them down on
+the burning pavement of hell! Between sixteen and twenty years of age
+there is apt to come a time when a young man is as much ashamed of
+not being able to deliver an oath as he is of the dizziness that comes
+from his first cigar. He has his hat and coat and boots of the
+right pattern, and there is but one thing more now to bring him into
+_fashion_, and that is a capacity to swear.
+
+So there are some of our young men surrounded by an atmosphere of
+profanities. Oaths sit on their lips, they roll under their tongues,
+and nest in the shock of hair. In elegant drawing-rooms they abstain
+from such utterances, but fill club-room and street with their
+immoralities of speech. You suggest the wrongfulness of the habit, and
+they thrust their finger in the sleeve of their vest, and swagger, and
+say: "Who cares!" They have no regard for God, but great respect for
+the ladies. Ah! there is no manliness in that.
+
+The most ungentlemanly thing a man can do is to swear. This habit is
+becoming more and more prevalent because of the immorality of parents
+and employers. There are very many fathers who indulge in this habit.
+They feel moved to utter themselves in this way, but first look around
+to see if their children are present. They have no idea that their
+children know anything about it. The probability is that if you swear,
+your children swear. They were in the next room and heard you, or
+somebody told them about your habit. Your child is practising to do
+just as you do. He is laughed at, at first, for his awkwardness, but
+after a while he will swear as well as you.
+
+Then look at the example of master carpenters, masons, roofers, and
+hatters. You know how some of you go around the building, and, when
+the work of your journeyman and subordinates does not please you, what
+do you say? It is not praying, is it? Forthwith, your journeymen
+and subordinates learn the habit. Hence our hat-shops, and
+house-scaffoldings, and side-walks, and wharves, and dockyards, and
+cellars, and lofts ring with blasphemies.
+
+Men argue that, if it is right for a man worth fifty or a hundred
+thousand dollars to swear, it can be overlooked in men who have merely
+their day's wages. Because they are poor must they be denied this one
+luxury?
+
+This habit becomes more prevalent because of the infirmities of
+temper. There are many men who, when at peace, are most fastidious
+of speech, but when aroused into the violence of passion, blaze with
+imprecation. The Oriental's wife spoken of would not have liked her
+husband to be profane under ordinary circumstances, but now that the
+camels are gone, and the sheep are gone, and the property is gone,
+and the boils have come, she says: "Why don't you swear? Curse God
+and die!" Others, all the year round, have not the froth of profanity
+wiped from their lips, but try to expend all the fury of a twelvemonth
+in one red-hot paragraph of five minutes. A man apologized for his
+occasional swearing by saying that, once in a year, in this way
+he cleared himself out. There are men who have no control of their
+blasphemous utterances, who want us to send them to Congress. Others
+have blasphemed in senatorial places, pretending afterwards that it
+was a mere rhetorical flourish.
+
+Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called
+by-words. I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in
+which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often
+ends in bald profanity. It is, "I declare!" "My stars!" "Mercy on me!"
+"Good gracious!" "By George!" "By Jove!" and "By heavens!" and no harm
+is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of
+talk to that which is positively obnoxious. The English language is
+magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and
+every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take
+to ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers
+to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your
+exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in
+his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and
+irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or
+hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition,
+and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a
+hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime
+has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their
+forked tongues,--words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored,
+Anglo-Saxon,--in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and
+Shakespeare wrote.
+
+But whatever be the source of this habit, it is on the increase. At
+sixteen, boys swear with as much facility as the grandfather did at
+sixty. Our streets are cursed by it from end to end. Our hotels, from
+morning until midnight, resound with it. Men curse on the way to the
+bar to get their morning dram; curse the news-boy who cries the paper;
+curse the breakfast for being cold; curse at the bank, and curse at
+the store; curse on the way to bed; curse at the stone against which
+they strike their foot; and curse at the splinter that gets under the
+nail. If you do not know that this is so, it is because your ear has
+been hardened by the perpetual din of profanities that are enough to
+bring down upon any city the hurricane of fire that consumed Sodom.
+
+The habit is creeping up into the higher circles. Every woman despises
+flat and unvarnished imprecations; but in the most elevated circles
+there are women who swear without knowing it. They have read Bulwer,
+and George Sand, and the exaggerated style of some of our imported as
+well as home-made periodical literature, until they do not actually
+know what is decency of speech. With fairy fan to their lips they
+utter their oaths, and, under chandeliers which discover not the
+faintest blush, recklessly speak the holiest of names. This is helped
+on by the second glass of wine, that is _perfectly harmless_; and
+though no one dare charge her, being so finely dressed, with anything
+like intoxication, yet there comes a glassiness to the eye, and a glow
+to the cheek, and a style of speech to the tongue that were not known
+before she took the second glass that was _perfectly harmless_.
+
+One wild, terrific wave of blasphemy is sweeping over the land. See
+the effects of this widespread profanity in the increasing perjury.
+If men in ordinary conversation so commonly use the name of God, is it
+wonderful that in the jury-box, and in the alderman's office, and
+in the custom-house so many swear falsely? Notice the way an oath is
+administered. They toss the Bible at a man, and in the most trivial
+way say: "So help you God--kiss the book." I suppose enough lies are
+every day told in the custom-house to sink it. Smuggling, although it
+be done against positive oath, is in some circles considered a grand
+joke; and you say some day to your friend, "How can you sell those
+goods so cheaply?" and your friend says with an eye-twinkle, "The
+Custom-House tariff was not as high on those things as it might have
+been." Men more easily break their solemn oaths than formerly. What
+strange verdicts juries do sometimes render! What peculiar charges
+judges do sometimes make! What unaccountable slowness sheriffs and
+their deputies sometimes exhibit in the execution of their writs! What
+erratic railroad enterprises suddenly pass at our State capitals! What
+wonderful changes Congress makes in the tariff on liquors!
+
+What is an oath? Anything solemn? Anything appealing to the Almighty?
+Anything stupendous in man's history? No! It is "kissing the book!"
+In a land where the name of God so often becomes the foot-ball of what
+are called respectable circles, how can we expect that it can excite
+any veneration when, in the presence of county clerk, or alderman, or
+judge, or legislative assembly, it is used in solemn adjuration? This
+habit lowers, bedwarfs, and destroys the entire moral nature. You
+might as well expect to raise harvests and vineyards on the side of
+belching Stromboli as to have any great excellency grow upon your soul
+when it so often overflows with the scoriae of this awful propensity.
+You will never swear yourself up. You will swear yourself down. The
+Mohammedans, when they find a slip of paper they cannot read, put
+it aside, for fear the name of God is on it. That, you say, is one
+extreme. We go to the other.
+
+You are willing to acknowledge this a miserable habit, and would like
+to have some recipe for its cure.
+
+Reflect much upon the uselessness of the habit. Did a volley of oaths
+ever start a heavy load? Did curses ever unravel a tangled skein? Did
+they ever extirpate the meanness of a customer? Did they ever collect
+a bad debt? Did they ever cure a toothache? Did they ever stop a
+twinge of the gout? Did they ever save you a dollar, or put you a step
+forward in any great enterprise? or enable you to gain a position, or
+to accomplish anything that you ever wanted to do? How much did
+you ever make by swearing? What, in all the round of a lifetime of
+profanity, did you ever _gain_ by the habit?
+
+Reflect, also, upon the fact that it arouses God's indignation. The
+Bible reiterates, in paragraph after paragraph, and chapter after
+chapter, the fact that all swearers and blasphemers are accursed now,
+and are to be forever miserable. There is no iniquity that has been so
+often visited with the immediate curse of God.
+
+At New Brunswick, a young man was standing on the railroad track
+blaspheming. The cars passed, and he was found on the track with his
+tongue cut out. People could not understand how, with comparatively
+little bruising of the rest of his body, his tongue could have been
+cut out. Not long ago, in Chicago, a man told a falsehood, and said
+that he hoped, if what he said was not true, God would strike him
+dead. He instantly fell. There was no longer any pulse. There was no
+reason for his death, except that he asked God to strike him dead,
+and God did it. In Scotland a club was formed, in which the members
+competed as to which could use the most horrid oaths. The man who
+succeeded best in the infamy was made president of the club. His
+tongue began to swell. It protruded from his mouth. He could not draw
+it in. He died within three days. Physicians were astounded. There was
+nothing like it in all the books. What was the matter with him? _He
+cursed God, and died!_ Near Catskill, N.Y., during a thunder-storm, a
+group of men were standing in a blacksmith-shop. There came a crash
+of thunder, and the men were startled. One man said that he was not
+afraid; and he made a wager that he dared go out in front of the shop,
+while the lightnings were flying, and dare the Almighty. He went
+out; shook his fist at the heavens, crying, "Strike, if you dare!"
+Instantly a thunder-bolt struck him. He was dead. He cursed God, and
+died!
+
+God will not abide this sin. He will not let it escape. There is a
+kind of manifold paper by which a man may, with a heavy pencil, write
+upon a dozen sheets at once--the writing going down through all the
+sheets. So every oath and blasphemy goes through, and is written
+indelibly on every leaf of God's remembrance. Ah! how much our Father
+bears! Can you make an estimate of how many blasphemies will roll up
+from the streets and saloons of our cities to-night? If you go out
+and look up you cannot see them. There will be no trail of fire on the
+sky. But the air is full of them. The name of Christ is not so often
+spoken in worship as in derision. God will be cursed to-night by
+hundreds of lips. The grog-shops will curse him. The houses of shame
+will curse him. Five Points will curse him. Bedford street will curse
+him. Chestnut street will curse him. Madison square will curse him.
+Beacon street will curse him. Every street in all our cities will
+curse him.
+
+This blasphemy is an abomination that no words of mine can describe.
+And God hears it. They curse His name. They curse his Sabbath. They
+curse his Bible. They curse his people. They curse his Only Begotten
+Son. Yes; they swear by the name of Jesus! It makes my hair rise, and
+my flesh creep, and my blood chill, and my breath catch, and my foot
+halt.
+
+Dionysius had a cave where men were incarcerated. At the top of the
+cave was an aperture to which he could put his ear, and could hear
+every sigh, every groan, every word of the inmates. This world is so
+arranged that all its voices go up to heaven. God puts down his ear
+and hears every word of praise offered, and every word of blasphemy
+spoken.
+
+Our cities must come to judgment. All these oaths must be answered
+for. They die on the air, but they have an eternal echo. Listen
+for the echo. It rolls back from the ages to come. Listen:--"_All
+blasphemers shall have their place in the lake that burneth with fire
+and brimstone_." Some have thought that a lost soul in the future
+world will do that which it was most prone to do in this world. If so,
+then think of a man blaspheming God through all eternity!
+
+This habit grows upon a man, until at last it pushes him off forever.
+I saw a man die with an oath between his teeth. Voltaire rose from
+his dying pillow, and, supposing that he saw Christ in the room, cried
+out, "Crush the wretch!" A celebrated officer during the last war fell
+mortally wounded, and the only word he sent to his wife was: "Tell her
+I fought like hell!"
+
+There are thousands of men who are having all their moral nature
+pulled down by the fiery fingers of this habit. At last, pinched,
+shrivelled, and consumed, they will get down on their beds to die, and
+at the step of the doctor in the hall, or the shutting of the front
+door, they will start up, thinking they hear the sepulchral gates
+creak open.
+
+Who is this God that you should maltreat his name? Has he been
+haunting you, starving you, or freezing you all your life? No! He is
+your Father, patient and loving. He rocked your cradle with blessings,
+from the time you were born. He clothes you now, and always has
+clothed you. You never had a sickness but he was sorry for you. He has
+brooded over you with wings of love. He has tried to press you to his
+heart of kindness and compassion. He wants to forgive you. He wants to
+help you. He wants to make you happy. He watched last night over your
+pillow while you slept. He will watch to-night. He was your father's
+God, and your mother's. He has housed them safe from the blast, and he
+wants to shelter you. Do you trifle with his name? Do you smite him in
+the face? Do you thrust him back by your imprecations?
+
+Who is this Jesus Christ that I hear men swearing by? Who is he? Some
+destroyer, that they so treat his name? What foul thing hath he done,
+that our great cities speak his name in thousand-voiced jeer and
+contempt? Who is he? A Lamb, whose blood simmered in the fires of
+sacrifice, to save you. A Brother, who put down his crown of glory
+that you might take it up. For many years he has been striving, night
+and day, to win your affections. There is nothing in heaven that he
+is not willing to give you. He came with blistered feet and streaming
+eyes, with aching head and broken heart to relieve you. On the craft
+of a doomed humanity he pushed out into the sea, to pick you off the
+rock. Who will ever again malign his name? Is there a hand that will
+ever again be lifted to wound him? If so, let that hand, blood-dipped,
+be lifted now. Which one of my readers will ever again utter his
+sacred name in imprecation? If any, now let them speak. Not one! Not
+one!
+
+One summer among the New England hills there was an evening memorable
+for storm and darkness. The clouds, which had been all day gathering,
+at last unlimbered their batteries. The Housatonic, that flows
+in silence save as the paddles of pleasure-parties rattle in the
+row-lock, was lashed into foam and its waves staggered, not knowing
+where to lay themselves. The hills jarred at the rumbling of God's
+chariots. Blinding sheets of rain drove the cattle to the bars, and
+beat against the window-pane as if to dash it in. The corn-fields
+crouched in the fury, and the ripened grain-fields threw their crowns
+of gold at the feet of the storm-king. After the night shut in, it
+was a double night. Its black mantle was rent with the lightnings, and
+into its locks were twisted the leaves of uprooted oaks, and shreds
+of canvas torn from the masts of the beached shipping. It was such a
+night as makes you thank God for shelter, and bids you open the door
+to let in even the spaniel howling outside with the terror. We went
+to sleep under the full blast of heaven's great orchestra, and the
+forests with uplifted voice, in choiring hosts that filled all the
+side of the mountains, praising the Lord.
+
+We waked not until the fingers of the sunny morn touched our eyelids.
+We looked out and. Housatonic slept as quiet as a baby's dream.
+Pillars of white cloud set up along the heavens looked like the
+castles of the blest, built for hierarchs of heaven on the beach of
+the azure sea. The trees sparkled as though there had been some great
+grief in heaven, and each leaf had been God-appointed to catch an angel's
+tear. It seemed as if God our Father had looked down upon earth, his
+wayward child, and stooped to her tear-wet cheek, and kissed it.
+
+Even so will the darkness of our country's crime and suffering be
+lifted. God will roll back the night of storm, and bring in the
+morning of joy. Its golden light will gild the city spire, and strike
+the forests of Maine, and tinge the masts of Mobile; and with one end
+resting upon the Atlantic beach and the other on the Pacific coast,
+God will spring a great rainbow arch of peace, in token of everlasting
+covenant that the land shall never again be deluged with crime.
+
+
+
+
+LIES: WHITE AND BLACK.
+
+
+There are ten thousand ways of telling a lie. A man's entire life may
+be a falsehood, while with his lips he may not once directly falsify.
+There are those who state what is positively untrue, but afterwards
+say, "may be," softly. These departures from the truth are called
+"white lies;" but there is really no such thing as a white lie. The
+whitest lie that was ever told was as black as perdition. No
+inventory of public crimes will be sufficient that omits this gigantic
+abomination. There are men, high in Church and State, actually useful,
+self-denying, and honest in many things, who, upon certain subjects,
+and in certain spheres, are not at all to be depended upon for
+veracity. Indeed, there are multitudes of men who have their notions
+of truthfulness so thoroughly perverted, that they do not know when
+they _are_ lying. With many it is a cultivated sin; with some it seems
+a natural infirmity. I have known people who seemed to have been born
+liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave.
+Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared
+in their first utterances and was as natural to them as any of
+their infantile diseases, and was a sort of moral croup or spiritual
+scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this
+tendency has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger
+development. They have gone from attainment to attainment, and from
+class to class, until they have become regularly graduated liars.
+
+The air of the city is filled with falsehoods. They hang pendent from
+the chandeliers of our finest residences; they crowd the shelves of
+some of our merchant princes; they fill the side-walk from curb-stone
+to brown-stone facing. They cluster around the mechanic's hammer,
+and blossom from the end of the merchant's yard-stick, and sit in
+the doors of churches. Some call them "fiction." Some style them
+"fabrication." You might say that they were subterfuge,
+disguise, delusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception,
+misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by
+the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I
+shall chiefly call them what my father taught me to call them--_lies_.
+
+I shall divide them into agricultural, mercantile, mechanical, and
+ecclesiastical lies; leaving those that are professional, social, and
+political for some other chapter.
+
+First, then, I will speak of those that are more particularly
+_agricultural_. There is something in the perpetual presence of
+natural objects to make a man pure. The trees never issue "false
+stock." Wheat-fields are always honest. Rye and oats never move out
+in the night, not paying for the place they have occupied. Corn shocks
+never make false assignments. Mountain brooks are always "current."
+The gold on the grain is never counterfeit. The sunrise never flaunts
+in false colors. The dew sports only genuine diamonds.
+
+Taking farmers as a class, I believe they are truthful, and fair in
+dealing, and kind-hearted. But the regions surrounding our cities
+do not always send this sort of men to our markets. Day by day there
+creak through our streets, and about the market-houses, farm wagons
+that have not an honest spoke in their wheels, or a truthful rivet
+from tongue to tail-board. During the last few years there have been
+times when domestic economy has foundered on the farmer's firkin.
+Neither high taxes, nor the high price of dry-goods, nor the
+exorbitancy of labor, could excuse much that the city has witnessed
+in the behavior of the yeomanry. By the quiet firesides of Westchester
+and Bucks counties I hope there may be seasons of deep reflection and
+hearty repentance.
+
+Rural districts are accustomed to rail at great cities as given up to
+fraud and every form of unrighteousness; but our cities do not absorb
+all the abominations. Our citizens have learned the importance of
+not always trusting to the size and style of apples in the top of a
+farmer's barrel, as an indication of what may be found farther down.
+Many of our people are accustomed to watch to see how correctly a
+bushel of beets is measured; and there are not many honest milk-cans.
+Deceptions do not all cluster around city halls. When our cities sit
+down and weep over their sins, all the surrounding counties ought to
+come in and weep with them.
+
+There is often hostility on the part of producers against traders,
+as though the man who raises the corn were necessarily more honorable
+than the grain dealer, who pours it into his mammoth bin. There ought
+to be no such hostility. The occupation of one is as necessary as that
+of the other. Yet producers often think it no wrong to snatch away
+from the trader; and they say to the bargain-maker, "You get your
+money easy." Do they get it easy? Let those who in the quiet field and
+barn get their living exchange places with those who stand to-day amid
+the excitements of commercial life, and see if they find it so very
+easy. While the farmer goes to sleep with the assurance that his corn
+and barley will be growing all the night, moment by moment adding to
+his revenue, the merchant tries to go to sleep, conscious that that
+moment his cargo may be broken on the rocks, or damaged by the wave
+that sweeps clear across the hurricane deck; or that the gold gamblers
+may, that very hour, be plotting some monetary revolution, or the
+burglars be prying open his safe, or his debtors fleeing the town, or
+his landlord raising the rent, or the fires kindling on the block that
+contains all his estate. _Easy!_ is it? God help the merchants! It is
+hard to have the palms of the hand blistered with out-door work; but a
+more dreadful process when, through mercantile anxieties, the brain is
+consumed!
+
+In the next place we notice _mercantile_ lies, those before the
+counter and behind the counter. I will not attempt to specify the
+different forms of commercial falsehood. There are merchants who
+excuse themselves for deviation from truthfulness because of what
+they call commercial custom. In other words, the multiplication and
+universality of a sin turns it into a virtue. There have been large
+fortunes gathered where there was not one drop of unrequited toil
+in the wine; not one spark of bad temper flashing from the bronze
+bracket; not one drop of needle-woman's heart-blood in the crimson
+plush; while there are other great establishments in which there is
+not one door-knob, not one brick, not one trinket, not one thread of
+lace, but has upon it the mark of dishonor. What wonder if, some day,
+a hand of toil that had been wrung, and worn out, and blistered until
+the skin came off, should be placed against the elegant wall-paper,
+leaving its mark of blood,--four fingers and a thumb; or that,
+some day, walking the halls, there should be a voice accosting the
+occupant, saying, _Six cents for making a shirt_; and, flying the
+room, another voice should say, _Twelve cents for an army blanket_;
+and the man should try to sleep at night, but ever and anon be
+aroused, until, getting up on one elbow, he should shriek out, _Who's
+there?_
+
+There are thousands of fortunes made in commercial spheres that are
+throughout righteous. God will let his favor rest upon every scroll,
+every pictured wall, every traceried window; and the joy that flashes
+from the lights, and showers from the music, and dances in the
+children's quick feet, pattering through the hall, will utter the
+congratulation of men and the approval of God.
+
+A merchant can, to the last item, be thoroughly honest. There is never
+any need of falsehood. Yet how many will, day by day, hour by hour,
+utter what they _know_ to be wrong. You say that you are selling at
+less than cost. If so, then it is right to say it. But did that thing
+cost you less than what you ask for it? If not, then you have lied.
+You say that article cost you twenty-five dollars. Did it? If so,
+then all right. If it did not, then you have lied. Suppose you are
+a purchaser. You are "beating down" the goods. You say that that
+article, for which five dollars is charged, is not worth more than
+four. Is it worth no more than four dollars? Then all right. If it be
+worth more, and, for the sake of getting it for less than its value,
+you wilfully depreciate it, you have lied. _You_ may call it a sharp
+trade. The recording angel writes it down on the ponderous tomes
+of eternity--"Mr. So and So, merchant on Water street, or in Eighth
+street, or in State street; or Mrs. So and So, keeping house on Beacon
+street, or on Madison avenue, or Rittenhouse square, told one
+lie." You may consider it insignificant, because relating to an
+insignificant purchase. You would despise the man who would falsify
+in regard to some great matter, in which the city or the whole country
+was concerned; but this is only a box of buttons, or a row of pins,
+or a case of needles. Be not deceived. The article purchased may be so
+small you can put it in your vest pocket, but the sin was bigger than
+the Pyramids, and the echo of the dishonor will reverberate through
+all the mountains of eternity.
+
+You throw out on your counter some specimens of handkerchiefs. Your
+customer asks, "Is that all silk? no cotton in it?" You answer, "It
+is all silk." Was it all silk? If so, all right. But was it partly
+cotton? Then you have lied. Moreover, you lost by the falsehood. The
+customer, though he may live at Lynn, or Doylestown, or Poughkeepsie,
+will find out that you defrauded him, and next spring, when he again
+comes shopping, he will look at your sign and say: "I will not try
+there. That is the place where I got that handkerchief." So that, by
+that one dishonest bargain, you picked your own pocket and insulted
+the Almighty.
+
+Would you dare to make an estimate of how many falsehoods in trade
+were yesterday told by hardware men, and clothiers, and fruit-dealers,
+and dry-goods establishments, and importers, and jewellers, and
+lumbermen, and coal-merchants, and stationers, and tobacconists? Lies
+about saddles, about buckles, about ribbons, about carpets, about
+gloves, about coats, about shoes, about hats, about watches, about
+carriages, about books,--about everything. In the name of the Lord
+Almighty, I arraign commercial falsehoods as one of the greatest of
+abominations in city and town.
+
+In the next place, I notice _mechanical_ lies. There is no class of
+men who administer more to the welfare of the city than artisans. To
+their hand we must look for the building that shelters us, for the
+garments that clothe us, for the car that carries us. They wield
+a widespread influence. There is much derision of what is called
+"_muscular Christianity_;" but in the latter day of the world's
+prosperity, I think that the Christian will be muscular. We have the
+right to expect of those stalwart men of toil the highest possible
+integrity. Many of them answer all our expectations, and stand at the
+front of religious and philanthropic enterprises. But this class, like
+the others that I have named, has in it those who lack in the element
+of veracity. They cannot all be trusted. In times when the demand for
+labor is great, it is impossible to meet the demands of the public, or
+do work with that promptness and perfection that would at other times
+be possible. But there are mechanics whose word cannot be trusted
+at any time. No man has a right to promise more work than he can do.
+There are mechanics who say that they will come Monday, but they do
+not come until Wednesday. You put work in their hands that they tell
+you shall be completed in ten days, but it is thirty. There have been
+houses built of which it might be said that every nail driven, every
+foot of plastering put on, every yard of pipe laid, every shingle
+hammered, every brick mortared, could tell of falsehood connected
+therewith. There are men attempting to do ten or fifteen pieces of
+work who have not the time or strength to do more than five or six
+pieces; but by promises never fulfilled keep all the undertakings
+within their own grasp. This is what they call _"nursing" the job_.
+
+How much wrong to his soul and insult to God a mechanic would save, if
+he promised only so much as he expected to be able to do. Society has
+no right to ask of you impossibilities.
+
+You cannot always calculate correctly, and you may fail because you
+cannot get the help that you anticipate. But now I am speaking of the
+wilful making of promises that you know you cannot keep. Did you say
+that that shoe should be mended, that coat repaired, those brick
+laid, that harness sewed, that door grained, that spout fixed, or that
+window glazed, by Saturday, knowing that you would neither be able
+to do it yourself nor get any one else to do it? Then, before God
+and man, you are a liar. You may say that it makes no particular
+difference, and that if you had told the truth you would have lost the
+job, and that people expect to be disappointed. But that excuse will
+not answer. There is a voice of thunder rolling among the drills, and
+planes, and shoe-lasts, and shears, which says: "All liars shall have
+their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone."
+
+I next notice _ecclesiastical_ lies; that is, falsehoods told for
+the purpose of advancing churches and sects, or for the purpose of
+depleting them. There is no use in asking many a Calvinist what an
+Arminian believes, for he will be apt to tell you that the Arminian
+believes that a man can convert himself; or to ask the Arminian
+what the Calvinist believes, for he will tell you that the Calvinist
+believes that God made some men just to damn them. There is no need of
+asking a pedo-Baptist what a Baptist believes, for he will be apt to
+say that the Baptist believes immersion to be positively necessary to
+salvation. It is almost impossible for one denomination of Christians,
+without prejudice or misrepresentation, to state the sentiment of
+an opposing sect. If a man hates Presbyterians, and you ask him what
+Presbyterians believe, he will tell you that they believe that there
+are infants in hell a span long.
+
+It is strange also how individual churches will sometimes make
+misstatements about other individual churches. It is especially so in
+regard to falsehoods told with reference to prosperous enterprises.
+As long as a church is feeble, and the singing is discordant, and the
+minister, through the poverty of the church, must go with threadbare
+coat, and here and there a worshipper sits in the end of a pew having
+all the seat to himself, religious sympathizers of other churches will
+say, "What a pity!" But, let a great day of prosperity come, and even
+ministers of the gospel, who ought to be rejoiced at the largeness and
+extent of the work, denounce, and misrepresent, and falsify,--starting
+the suspicion, in regard to themselves, that the reason they do not
+like the corn is because it is not ground in their own mill.
+
+How long before we shall learn to be fair in our religious criticisms!
+The keenest jealousies on earth are church jealousies. The field of
+Christian work is so large that there is no need that our hoe-handles
+hit.
+
+May God extirpate from the world ecclesiastical lies, commercial lies,
+mechanical lies, and agricultural lies, and make every man, the world
+over, to speak truth with his neighbor!
+
+
+
+
+A GOOD TIME COMING.
+
+
+As on some bitter cold night, while threshing our hands about to keep
+our thumbs from freezing, we have looked up and seen the northern
+lights blazing along the sky, the windows of heaven illumined at
+the news of some great victory, so from beyond this bitter night of
+abomination a brightness strikes through from the other side.
+
+I have thought that it would be well, in these chapters on the sins of
+the times, to lift before you a vision of what our cities will be
+when the work of good men shall have been concluded and our population
+redeemed. I doubt not that sometimes men have shut this book, thinking
+that the gigantic wrongs we depict may never be discomfited. Lest you
+be utterly disheartened, I will show you that we fight in a war in
+which we will be completely victorious. This is to be no drawn battle;
+for, when it is done, the result will not be disputed by a man on
+earth, or an angel in heaven, or a devil in hell. We shall have
+captured every one of the strongholds of darkness. You and I will
+live to see the day when gambling-hells will be changed into places of
+Christian merchandise, and houses of sin swept and garnished for the
+residence of the purest home circles.
+
+Beethoven was deaf, and could not hear the airs he composed; but when
+the song of universal disenthralment arises, and white Circassian
+stands up by the side of black Ethiopian, and tropical groves wave to
+the Lebanon cedars, we shall, standing somewhere, know it and see it,
+and hear it. If gone from earth, we will be allowed to come out on the
+hills and look.
+
+We do not talk about impossibilities. We do not propose a medicine
+about which we have to say that it will "kill or cure." For this balm
+that oozes from the tree of heaven will inevitably cure.
+
+I remark that this coming time of municipal elevation will be a time
+of financial prosperity. Many seem to suppose that when the world's
+better days come, the people will forsake their industries, and give
+themselves to perpetual psalm-singing, and, being all absorbed in
+spiritual things, will become reckless as to dress and dwelling; and
+very rigid laws then governing the commercial world, all enterprise
+and speculation will cease, and all hilarity be stricken out of the
+social circle. There is no warrant for such an absurd anticipation. I
+suppose that when society is reconstructed, where there is now, in the
+course of a year, one fortune made, there will be a hundred fortunes
+made. Every one knows that the commercial world thrives in proportion
+as there is confidence between man and man; and the extirpation of all
+double-dealing and fraud from society will increase this confidence,
+and hence greater prosperity. The heavy commercial disasters that have
+smitten this land were the work of godless speculators and infamous
+stock-gamblers. It is crime that is the mightiest foe to business;
+but when the right shall hurl back into ruin the plots of bad men,
+and purify the commercial code, and thunder down fraudulent
+establishments, and put into the hands of honest men the keys of
+commercial prosperity, blessed will be the bargain-makers of the city.
+
+That will be a prosperous time, for taxes will be a mere nothing.
+Every style of business is taxed now to the utmost. City taxes, county
+taxes, State taxes, United States taxes, license taxes, manufacturing
+taxes, stamp taxes,--taxes! taxes! taxes! Our citizens must make a
+small fortune every year to meet these exactions. What hand fastens
+to all of our great industries this tremendous load? Crime! We have
+to pay the board of every man and woman who, by intemperance, is
+cast into the alms-house. We have to support the orphans of those who
+plunge themselves into their graves by beastly indulgences. We support
+from our pockets the large machinery of municipal government, which is
+vast just in proportion as the criminal proclivities of the city
+are great. What makes necessary hospitals, houses of refuge,
+police-stations, and alms-houses, the Tombs, Sing Sing, and
+Moyamensing?
+
+In that good time coming there shall be no exhaustive taxation; no
+orphans homeless, for parents will be able to leave their children
+a competency; no prisons, for crime will have given place to virtue.
+Then the vast swindles which now, from time to time, disgrace our
+cities, will be unheard of. No voting of public money that, on its way
+to some city improvement, falls into the pockets of those who voted
+it. No courts of Oyer and Terminer, at vast expense to the people. No
+empanelling of juries to inquire into theft, arson, murder, slander,
+and black-mail. In that day of redemption there will be better
+factories, grander architecture, finer equipages, larger estates,
+richer opulence.
+
+Again: when our cities are purified the churches will be multiplied,
+purified, and strengthened. Now, denominations, and the individuals of
+the different sects, are often jealous of each other. Christians are
+not always kindly disposed toward each other; and ministers of the
+gospel sometimes forget the bond of brotherhood. In that day they will
+be sympathetic and helpful. There may be differences of opinion and
+sentiment, but no acerbity, no hypercriticism, and no exclusiveness.
+In that day all the churches will be filled with worshippers. We
+have not to-day, in the cities, church-room for one-fourth of our
+population; and yet there is a great deal more room than the people
+occupy. The churches do not average an attendance of five hundred
+people. The vast majority do not attend public worship. But in the
+day of which I speak there will be enough church-room to hold all the
+people, and the room will be occupied. In that time what rousing songs
+will be sung! What earnest sermons will be preached! What fervent
+prayers will be offered! In these days a _fashionable_ church is a
+place where, after a careful toilet, a few people come in, sit down,
+and what time they can get their minds off their stores, or away from
+the new style of hat in the seat before them, listen in silence to the
+minister--warranted to hit no man's sins--and to the choir, who are
+agreed to sing tunes that nobody knows; and, having passed away an
+hour in dreamy lounging, go home refreshed.
+
+I pronounce much of what is called "church music," in our day, a
+mockery and a farce. Though I have neither a cultured voice nor a
+cultured ear, no man shall do my singing. When the storms, and the
+trees, and the dragons are called on to praise the Lord, I feel that
+I must sing, for I know more about music than do the dragons. Nothing
+can take the place of artistic music. The dollar that I pay to hear
+Parepa or Nilsson sing is far from being wasted. But, when the hymn
+is read, and the angels of God stoop from their thrones to bear up
+on their wings the praise of the great congregation, let us not drive
+them away with our indifference. I have preached in churches where
+fabulous sums of money were paid to performers, and the harmony was
+exquisite as any harmony that ever went up from an Academy of Music;
+and yet, for all the purposes of devotion, I would prefer the hearty,
+out-breaking song of a backwoods Methodist camp-meeting. When these
+fancy starveling songs get up to the gate of heaven, how do you
+suppose they look, standing beside the great doxologies of the
+glorified? Let an operatic performance, floating upward, get many
+hours the start, and it shall be caught and passed by the shout of the
+Sailors' Bethel, or the hosanna of the Sabbath-school children.
+
+I know a church where there was no singing except that done by the
+choir, save one old Christian man; and they waited upon him by
+a committee, and asked him if he would not stop singing, for he
+disturbed the choir!
+
+The day cometh when all the churches will rejoice in this department
+of service, rightly conducted, and when from all the great audiences
+of attentive worshippers will rise a multitudinous anthem.
+
+"O God! let all the people praise thee!" Again: when the city is
+redeemed, the low haunts of vice and pollution will be extinguished.
+Mr. Etzler, of England, proposes, by the forces of tide, and wind,
+and wave, and sunshine, to reconstruct the world. In a book of
+much genius, which rushed rapidly from edition to edition, he
+says:--"Fellow-men: I promised to show the means of creating a
+paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life
+may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor and without
+pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most
+beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces,
+in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful
+gardens; where he may accomplish without labor, in one year, more than
+hitherto could be done in thousands of years; may level continents;
+sink valleys; create lakes; drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the
+land everywhere with beautiful canals and roads for transporting heavy
+loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling a thousand miles in
+twenty-four hours; may cover the ocean with floating islands, movable
+in any desired direction, with an immense power and celerity, in
+perfect security, and with all the comforts and luxuries; bearing
+gardens and palaces, with thousands of families, and provided with
+rivulets of sweet water; may explore the interior of the globe, and
+travel from pole to pole in a fortnight; provide himself with means
+yet unheard of for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his
+intelligence; leading a life of continual happiness, of enjoyment yet
+unknown; free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind
+except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human
+life, and, finally, render it less afflicting. From the houses to be
+built will be afforded the most enrapturing views to be fancied;
+from the galleries, from the roof, and from its turrets may be seen
+gardens, as far as the eye can see, full of fruits and flowers,
+arranged in the most beautiful order, with walks, colonnades,
+aqueducts, canals, ponds, plains, amphitheatres, terraces, fountains,
+sculptured works, pavilions, gondolas, places for public amusement,
+to delight the eye and fancy. All this to be done by urging the water,
+the wind, and the sunshine to their full development." Mr. Etzler
+gives plates of the machinery by which all this is to be done. He
+proposes the organization of a company; and says small shares of
+twenty dollars will be sufficient--in all from two hundred thousand to
+three hundred thousand dollars--to create the first establishment for
+a whole community, of from three to four thousand individuals. "At the
+end of five years we shall have a principal of two hundred millions
+of dollars; and so paradise will be wholly regained at the end of the
+tenth year."
+
+There is more reason in this than in many of the plans proposed; but
+mechanical forces can never recreate the world. I shall take no shares
+in the large company that is proposed; my faith is that Christianity
+will yet make the worst street of our cities better than the best
+street now is.
+
+Archimedes consumed the enemies of Syracuse by a great sun-glass. As
+the ships came up the harbor, the sun's rays were concentrated upon
+them: now the sails are wings of fire; the masts fall, and the vessels
+sink. So, by the great sun-glass of the Gospel, the rays of heaven
+will be concentred upon all the filth and unchastity and crime of our
+great towns, and under the heat they will blaze and expire. When the
+day comes that I have shown will come, suppose you that there will
+be any midnight brawls? any shivering mendicants, kicked off from the
+marble steps? any droves of unwashed, uncombed, unfed children? any
+blasphemers in the street? any staggering past of inebriates? No! No
+wine-cellars. No lager-beer saloons. No distilleries where they make
+the XXX. No bloated cheeks. No blood-shot eyes. No fist-battered
+foreheads. The grandchildren of that woman who now walks up the street
+with a curse, as the boys stone her, will be philanthropists, and heal
+the sick, and manage great commercial enterprises.
+
+When our cities are so raised, we shall have a different style of
+municipal government. The great question, in regard to the execution
+of the law, now is: "What is popular?" Our city governments
+slumber--great carcasses of insufficiency, sending up their stench
+into the nostrils of high heaven, while there are thousands of
+gambling-houses, and drinking-saloons, and more places of damnable
+lust than the decency of the country has time to count. Do you tell me
+that the authorities do not know it? They do know it. All the police
+know it. The sheriff and his deputies know it. The aldermen know it.
+The mayors know it. Everybody who keeps his eyes and ears open knows
+it. In the name of God I impeach the municipal authorities of many of
+our cities, that they neglect to execute the law. You cannot charge
+it upon any one party. Within the past few years both parties, and
+all kinds of parties, have been in power; but the work has never been
+done. You have but to pass the City Hall, or look in upon the rooms of
+some of our city officials, to see to what sort of men our cities have
+been abandoned. Look at the swearing, bloated, sensual wretches who
+stand on the outside of the New York City Hall, picking their teeth,
+waiting for some crumbs of emolument to fall at their feet; and then
+tell me how far it is from New York to Sodom. Who are those wretched
+women sent up in the city van to the police-court, apprehended for
+drunkenness? They will be locked up in jail; but what will be done
+with the groggeries that made them drunk? Who are these men in the
+city-prison? That man stole a pair of shoes; that boy, one dollar from
+the counter; that girl snatched a purse--all villanies of less than
+twenty or thirty dollars' damage to the community; but for
+that gambler, who last night took that young man's thousand
+dollars--nothing! For that man who broke in upon the purity of a
+Christian household, and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the
+strategy of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly
+despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to the bottomless
+pit--nothing! For those who "fleeced" a young man, and induced him to
+filch from his employers vast sums of money, until, in his agony, he
+came to an officer of the church, and frantically asked what he should
+do--nothing!
+
+Verily, small crimes ought to be punished; but it were more just if
+our authorities would turn out from our jails and penitentiaries the
+small villains, the petty criminals, the infantile offenders, the
+ten-dollar desperadoes, and fill their places with some of these
+monsters of abomination, who drive their roan span through our fine
+streets until honest men have to fly to escape being run over; and
+if they would turn out from their incarceration the poor girls of
+the town, and put in some of the magnificent ladies who cover up the
+sidewalk with their unpaid-for fineries, and with scornful look, in
+the church-aisle, pass the daughters of poverty, who with their
+faded dress and plain hat _dare_ to come to worship God in the same
+sanctuary.
+
+But all these wrongs shall be righted. Our streets shall hear the
+tramp of a regenerated multitude. Three hundred and sixty bells were
+rung in Moscow when the prince was married; but when righteousness
+and peace shall "kiss each other" in all the earth, ten thousand bells
+will strike the jubilee. Poverty enriched. Hunger fed. Disease cured.
+Crime purified. The cities saved.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Abominations of Modern Society
+by Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
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