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  ABOMINATIONS OF MODERN SOCIETY
  by Witt Talmage Thomas De
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Talmage's fiery sermons denouncing the moral evils of 19th-century American
society including political corruption, social injustice, and personal vice,
calling for repentance and reform.

  Chapters: 13

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00 The Abominations of Modern Society
    2. 01 The Curtain Lifted
    3. 02 Winter Nights
    4. 03 The Power of Clothes
    5. 04 After Midnight
    6. 05 The Indiscriminate Dance
    7. 06 Massacre by the Sewing Needle
    8. 07 Leprous Newspapers
    9. 08 Gambling
   10. 09 Some of the Club-houses
   11. 10 The Evil Beast—the Dreadful Abomination of Rum
   12. 11 Swearing
   13. 12 Lies—White and Black

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  CHAPTER 1: 00 THE ABOMINATIONS OF MODERN SOCIETY
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The Abominations of Modern Society by T. De Witt Talmage, Brooklyn, 1872 The
Curtain Lifted

Winter Nights The Power of Clothes

After Midnight The Indiscriminate Dance Massacre by the Sewing Needle Leprous
Newspapers

Gambling Some of the Club-Houses The Evil Beast—the Dreadful Abomination of Rum
House of Blackness of Darkness

Swearing Lies—White and Black


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  CHAPTER 2: 01 THE CURTAIN LIFTED
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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 delight 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 did Dr. Webster like 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 base 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
people. 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 are, 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 Savior’s feet with her tears, and wipes 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 clean!"

Those 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 impure 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 sepulchers. 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—the 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!" Someone 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, that 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 vile 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 ascends up forever and ever?

If a slaughter-house is 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 and father once. 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 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! That 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 the
sun! We need 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!" says 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


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  CHAPTER 3: 02 WINTER NIGHTS
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WINTER NIGHTS The inhabitants of one of the old cities were told that they would
have to flee 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, which 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 base 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 is 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.

Someone 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 has 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! I take the words of the Lord Almighty, and cry, "Woe to him that puts
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 has 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 which 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 today,
an inebriate who did not begin with ale.

"30:" What does that mark mean? 30 on the beer-barrel: 30 on the brewer’s dray:
30 on the door of the gin-shop: 30 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. "30." If I were going to write a story, the first chapter
would be "30"; 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 meal,
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 has 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 expensive silver, no gorgeous
upholstery—but only 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 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
launderer 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 the tree of life 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!


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 4: 03 THE POWER OF CLOTHES
========================================================================

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 flowers 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 has extended her
scepter. For thousands of years she has 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 and kings have bowed their plumes. 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.

Fashion has 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 peace pipe of the Indian chieftain. Hottentot and Siberian
obey her 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 has hung the pillars with embroidery,
and strewn the floor with plush. Her loom has 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 suit, 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 "fashion" compelled to submit to social customs.

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 totally
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.

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.

Slavery to 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,
ought not to raise one into the first rank. Some of the basest men I have ever
known, had at the end of their name D.D. (Doctor of Divinity). Truth, honor,
charity, heroism, self-sacrifice, should win highest favor; but inordinate
fashion says—"Count not a woman’s virtues; count her rings; see the way she
combs her hair." 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 wicked men are at the top, and some of the most virtuous and
intelligent people 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 godly 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 millionaire
should lose a penny out of his pocket, would he sit down on a curb-side and cry?
And shall a man possessed of everlasting fortunes wear himself out with grief,
because he has lost worldly trifle? You have only lost that in which hundreds of
wretched misers surpass you; and you have retained 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 someone, "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 in business." 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 which bears the tides of excited population up and
down our streets, and rocks the world of commerce, and thrills all nations,
is—clothes. It decides the last offices of respect to a dying friend; 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 near 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 concern is—who shall have the
finest house and the most costly equipage. The weapons used in the warfare of
social life are not guns and canons—but chairs and mirrors, and vases, and
decorations and clothing. 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, "so long as we only come out ahead?"
There is no one cause today 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 people who will risk their eternity upon one
fine looking-glass, or who will forfeit the splendors of heaven—to get another
trinket. "But godliness with contentment is a great gain. For we brought nothing
into the world, and we can take nothing out. But if we have food and clothing,
we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into
temptation, a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge people
into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,
and by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves
with many pains!" 1 Timothy 6:6-10

"My house is too small." "But," says someone, "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—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 notorious 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 is small. If
it is 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 pretenses, 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. 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 people are really natural and sincere. 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—that 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 in 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 together for a quiet evening, there is more good
cheer than in all the elegant ice-houses of the metropolis. We need, 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 criticize 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 fright!" "What a pity that such a 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 who lives in
pleasure, is dead while she lives." The revelations of high life which come to
the challenge, are only the occasional croppings out of disquietudes which are,
underneath, like the stars of heaven for multitude—but like the demons of the
pit for hate. The misery that tonight 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 beer mug—as
when it pours from 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, which make one not beastly intoxicated—but only fashionably drunk; and
luxurious indolence—are the instruments by which this unreal life pushes its
disciples into extravagance and the grave. Along the walks of high life—Death
goes a mowing—and such harvests as are reaped! Medicine has been exhausted to
find curatives for these physical devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions,
gout, and almost every infirmity in all the realm of pathology, have been the
penalty paid. To counteract the damage, quacks have gone forth with their
panaceas! Tonight, with swollen feet, upon cushioned ottoman, and groaning with
aches innumerable—is the votary of luxurious living, not half so happy as his
coal-heaver. Fashion is the world’s undertaker, and drives thousands of hearses
to the cemetery!

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 is 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 dress!

I have known some, who have no regard for their character, or their momentous
and eternal interests, exasperated by the shape of a shirt-button! What is the
matter with that sad woman? O, her hat 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 dashed
to hell. The excitement of a luxurious life has been the vortex that has
swallowed up more souls—than the sea has ever devoured ships. What room is left
for elevating themes—in a heart filled with trivial and petty things? Who can
wonder that in this haste for gilded baubles—that men should tumble into eternal
ruin! The travelers to destruction are not all clothed in rags. On that road
chariot jostles against chariot; and behind steeds in golden-plated and
glittering harness—they go down to 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! 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
this fop and fashion?

Watch the career of one who is devoted to fashion. 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 so
uncultured!" "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." He is delighted with some doubtful story of
Parisian life—but thinks that there are some very indecent things in the Bible.
He walks arm in arm with a millionnaire—but does not know his own brother. He
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. Upstairs—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 who died on the floor, and he who expired under princely upholstery. He is
carried out to burial. Only a few sincere 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 poverty 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—"Hark!
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.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 5: 04 AFTER MIDNIGHT
========================================================================

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 open 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. 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 left 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 centers 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 hang over ten thousand evening meals—the
parents at either end of the table, the children between. Thank God! "who sets
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 await the signal from the orchestra. The footlights of
the theater 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.
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 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 out over the pillow, with every breath inhaling a new store of fun
and frolic. Let the great multitudes sleep! A slumberless Eye will watch them.
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 tonight. 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 today. 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 wicked 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
wicked 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 wicked 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 tomorrow 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,
a part of the time awake; but at twelve tonight 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 evil 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 club. 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—or
lost—before morning! Some of the firms that once thrived, have already foundered
on the gambler’s table. The money-drawer in many a mercantile house will this
year mysteriously spring a leak.

Gambling is a portentous vice, and is making great efforts to become
respectable. Recently a member of Congress played, and carried 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 tonight, 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. Lounges and couches with deep cushions, the perfection of
upholstery, invite to rest and repose. Tufts of geranium, from bead baskets,
suspended mid-room, drop their bewitching 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 having 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 the city, 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 million dollars are annually lost in New York city at the gambling-table.
Some of your own friends may be at it. The agents of these gambling-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 gambling-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 robber has more love for the belated traveler upon whose carcass he
piles the stone; the frost has more feeling for the flower it kills; the fire
has more tenderness for the tree-branch it consumes; the storm has more pity for
the ship that it shatters —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
o’clock they fall to the floor, asking for more drink. At two o’clock, they are
unconscious and breathing hard. They would not flee, 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-reveler 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! you who have been longing for fields of
evangelistic 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 clothing, 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 is uttered, there will come back a score of
echoes. Only 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 someone 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 Savior’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 repents, than
over ninety-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:

Acts 1:1-26.—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.

Acts 2:1-47.—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.

Acts 3:1-26.—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.

Acts 4:1-37.—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.

Acts 5:1-42.—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!


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 6: 05 THE INDISCRIMINATE DANCE
========================================================================

THE INDISCRIMINATE DANCE

It is the celebration 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. Give us more music. Sound the instruments. 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 men 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 she dances before him. 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: "Whatever you shall ask of me—I will give it to you—up 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 jug 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 head 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 godly 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 revelry which
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 Bible truth, 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 has 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.
In other days there were festal dances, and funeral dances, and military 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 native Indians of America 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.
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 who enters into a dance, enters into
his possession. As many passes as a man makes in dancing, so many passes does he
make to hell." Elsewhere, these old dogmas declare, "The woman who sings in the
dance is the princess of the devil; and those who 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 hog-herder
calls one, all assemble together, so the devil calls one woman to sing in the
dance, or to play on some instrument, then 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 joins hands with her children, and
while the eldest strikes the keys, and they 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 wish that men could keep 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 innocent 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. Innumerable bodies and
souls 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—will at last be recorded suicides. There is but a short step from
the ball-room to the grave-yard! There are diseases and fierce neuralgias close
on the track. Amid that glittering maze of ball-room splendors, diseases stand
right and left. 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. 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 people 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 petty things; this harassing anxiety about dress; this talk of fashionable
infinitesimals; this shoe-pinched, hair-frizzled, fringe-spattered group—who
simper and look askance at the mirrors and wonder, with infinity of interest,
"how that one geranium leaf does look on my dress?;" 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! Has the
polished, glistening dance floor, ever been the road to heaven? Who at the flash
of those chandeliers, has kindled a torch for eternity? From 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 impure
passions move in mask. Across the floor they trip merrily. The lights sparkle
along the wall, or drop from the ceiling. 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 polished
dance floor, 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!


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  CHAPTER 7: 06 MASSACRE BY THE SEWING NEEDLE
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Massacre by the Sewing Needle

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 in life. 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 today,
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 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 mirror, 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 and cruelty 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—that riches have wings and fly
away? Though you should be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the
trickery of executors may sink it in a night. Or some elders or deacons of our
churches may get up some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the church,
and induce your children to put their money into a hole in Venango County. And
if the sunken money cannot be pumped up again, they will 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. 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! 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 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 indolent—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 and make beds—as it is to run a
shop. As far as I can understand, the line of acceptability lies between that
which is useful and that which is useless. If women do that which is of no
value—their work is dishonorable. If they do practical work—it is honorable.
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 art brush,
beautify a mantel-ornament—but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble
mantel. You may learn fine music until you can squall Italian—but never make a
penny. I scout these finical notions.

I tell you that a woman, no more than a man, has any 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—you breathe
forty hogsheads of good pure air. You must, by some kind of usefulness, pay for
all this. 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. 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 constructed 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 handling animals, let her handle the farm. If
Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry ladder. If Lydia
will be a merchant, let her sell purple.

It is said, "if woman is given such opportunities, she will occupy places that
might be taken by men." I say, if she has 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.

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 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.

I say, if there is 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 baseness, 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 today, 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 pinched 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 womanhood.
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 shriveled 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, are 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
resolution?

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 coat-makers? If a
woman asks a dollar for her work, does not her female employer ask her if she
will 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—a man may forgive—but a 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 is 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 anyone 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-support; 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
may close; the wages may fail; but, over every godly woman’s head, there are
spread the two great, gentle, stupendous wings of the Almighty God!

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 butterfly 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 gender!
Her manners are an outrage upon decency. She is more concerned of the response
she strikes upon the dance floor—than how she will look in the judgment! She is
more worried about her freckles—than her sins! She is more interested in her
bonnet strings—than in her redemption! Her apparel is the poorest part of a
woman, however magnificently dressed.

See the godless disciple of fashion. Take her robes—and you take everything.
Death will come down on her some day, and rub the make-up 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 wicked
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 a 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. She knew
better than anyone 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 some 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 covered
the coffin with flowers; 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 far above rubies!" And Jesus, as unto the maiden in
Judea, commanded: "I say unto you—arise!"


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  CHAPTER 8: 07 LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS
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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 monthly, and 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 today—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 railroad 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 shriveled heart, who begrudges the five
pennies he pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet. There are today
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 news. 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!" 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
center, an operator will send the messages, north and south, and east and
west—all catching the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some center to
which shall reach all the electric wires that cross the continent and undergird
the sea, someone 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 engorged with abominations. New York scoops up
from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own newspaper filth. And
tonight, 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 amazing 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, which 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 papers, 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 news which they bring! There are
hundreds of men today 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 people may be damaged;
but a newspaper of large circulation which willfully 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 murder 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?

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 impure advertisement. It is so much money—for
so many words, and 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: "May your money perish with you!"
But I arraign the newspapers that give their columns to corrupt advertising for
the nefarious work they are doing. The most polluted plays which ever oozed from
the poisonous pen of leprous dramatist, have won their deathful power through
the medium of newspapers! The evil is stupendous! O you reckless souls must get
money—though morality dies, and society is dishonored, and God defied, and the
doom of destroyed people 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 you
do stake your 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 there, are trying to climb up and put out the only light of a lost
world? The bad newspaper does not stop at publishing the most damaging and
impure story. The only question is: "Will it buy it?" 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 the impure issue with avidity. 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, has dashed their life out!

While I speak, there are many people, with feet on the ottoman, looking down on
the page, submerged, mind and soul, in the perusal of this God-forsaken
literature; and as the city clock strikes the hour of midnight, will 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 truly religious, it becomes
bankrupt, unless some benevolent and Christian men come up to sustain it by
contributions of money and means. There are but few religious newspapers in this
country, which 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 today, 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 garbage cannot be handled without being polluted! Away with it from parlor,
and shop, and store! There is so much newspaper literature which is pure, and
cheap, and elegant; shove back this leprosy from your door. Mark it well—a man
is no better than the newspaper which 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. 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 true 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, which 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
takes away the sins of the world. IN ETERNITY, DIVES IS THE BEGGAR!


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  CHAPTER 9: 08 GAMBLING
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GAMBLING

While among my readers are those who have passed on into the evening 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 business. The sound of business 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 way 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 gambling 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 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 gambling 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
risk. The instruments of gambling 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 "speculative" stocks, or
conducts a business which 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 gambling. Lottery
tickets 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 a hundred shares of stock. Whatever
instrument you employ—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 new
thought—but a haggard transgression which 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
gambling 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. The
British Museum and Westminster Bridge were partially built by similar
procedures. But now, the laws of the whole civilized world denounce the system.
Enactments have been passed—but only partially enforced. The men interested in
gambling 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. Ten years ago, the House of
Commons of England had prohibited gambling—and now go out to bet on the races.
And in the best circles of society in this country today, 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 open
gambling.

Says a traveler through the West—"I have traveled 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 Southwest of this country
reeks with this abomination. In New Orleans every third or fourth house in many
of the streets, is a gambling 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 are
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 of gambling; in Philadelphia about four thousand; in
Cincinnati about one thousand; at Washington the amount of gambling 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 cellar, or at the table in 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
traveler—providing free drinks all around—but also 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 gambling-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 that 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 gambling-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 inherited a large inheritance, 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 high road to hell—and no preacher’s voice, or startling warning, or
wife’s entreaty—can make him stop his headlong career for a moment. The infernal
spell is on him; a giant is aroused within; and though you bind him with
cables—they would break 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 gambling-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, and broken the teeth of
the farmer’s harrow. The very first idea in gambling, 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 linen, 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 to England and America. 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 gambling-houses that once were authorized in Paris passed
through the banks, yearly, three hundred and twenty-five million 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 gambling-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 gambling. 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 a balm which 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 gambling? 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
gambling 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 gambling-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! Gambling has written the counterfeit signature, emptied the banker’s
money vault, and wielded the assassin’s dagger. There is no depth of baseness to
which it will not stoop. There is no cruelty at which it is appalled. There is
no warning of God which it will not dare. Merciless, unappeasable, fierce and
wild—it blinds, it hardens, it rends, it blasts, it crushes, it damns! It has
peopled the prisons and mental institutions. 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 gambling 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 til—into the gambling hell. A man in London
keeping one of these gambling houses, boasted that he had ruined a nobleman in
one day; but if all the saloons of this land were to speak out, they would 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 has 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 warm 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 gambling-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 practiced 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 gambling-table, they shout "Foul! foul!" Over all the gambling-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 which 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 blessed 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 became a vagabond, and his children were picked up from the
street half starved and almost naked. A hard-working machinist wins 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 people 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, before 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 my 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 enterprise, in which they fondly believe
there can be no harm! At no time have lottery tickets been sown so broadcast as
today, 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 multitude
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 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
pretense of anxiety to make their minister a present, or please some popular
member of the church, fascinating people 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
the apostle 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 cemetery! The modern habit of betting about everything is
productive of immense mischief. The most healthful and innocent amusements of
yachting and baseball 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 nervous,
excitable temperaments which are 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 which fell—as the soul! the soul! 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, those 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 before he throws the first card,
he stakes the last relic of his wife—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 unutterable pains!

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 near 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 daisies 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!


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 10: 09 SOME OF THE CLUB-HOUSES
========================================================================

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. Just 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 unsuspecting.

Men are gregarious. Cattle group in herds. Fish group in schools. Birds group in
flocks. Men group 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.

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 passwords, 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, reveling, 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 arts, or the defense 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; likewise with 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 for earning a
livelihood, by sickness or accident. 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 prospects. 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 are not half so
happy. It is not the public drinking-saloon which is taking you down, nor
theatrical amusements, nor the houses of sin which 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—which
you got at the club. You merely acknowledge that you feel different. 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
people 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 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 criticize the passers-by.

While 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 you 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 tavern, 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, 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 of 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
different 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 bar-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 walk in boots of French leather, dismount from a rich
carriage, or draw tight rein over a swift, sleek, high-mettled, full-blooded
Arabian horse—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 garbage. The fact that
this whole land today swelters with drunkenness, I charge upon the drinking club
houses. They wield an influence which makes it respectable, and I will not put
my head to the pillow tonight until I have written against them one burning
anathema! 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 which throw their garlands upon the brow, and ring their music into
the ear, go a great multitude. 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 pleasure, 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
lingers—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 head-start on him. And so you will both go to hell together! A revolving
light on the front of a locomotive casts its gleam through the darkness as it is
turned around. Just 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! Bu you have already "paid your
dues?" Sacrifice that—rather than your soul. "Good fellows," are they? They
cannot stay what they are, under such influences.

Molluscs live two hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag
grows fat on the stunted growth of mountain peaks. The Hedysarium thrives amid
the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot lips of
volcanic Schneehalten. But can 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 logs, and the fire bursts through and up, and out,
mirthful of flash, mirthful 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!


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 11: 10 THE EVIL BEAST—THE DREADFUL ABOMINATION OF RUM
========================================================================

The Evil Beast—the Dreadful Abomination of Rum

There has in all ages and climates been a tendency to the improper use of
addictive substances. 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 million of our race are opium-eaters. India, Turkey, and China have
groaned with the desolation. One hundred million, are the victims of the
betel-nut, which has specially accursed the East Indies. Three hundred million
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 robber’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 alcohol could be piled up, it
would make a monster pyramid. Talk not of Waterloo and Austerlitz, for they were
not fields of blood, when 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 clear sight
at the monster before we can shoot him!

I will begin at our national and State capitals. Like government, like people.
Henry VII blasts all England with his example of impurity. 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 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 out of the room. 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 vote for sober men? The fact is, that the
two million 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 you 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-burned 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 distill 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 drink 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
alcoholic beverages. Those 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 drink 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 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. Pictures on the wall cut out of the Police Gazette.
A slush of beer on the counter. A pistol falls out of a ruffian’s pocket. By the
gas-light a knife flashes. Vulgar songs. They banter, and jeer, and howl—and
vomit. An awful end, 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 as bright as
a home can be. The father comes at nightfall, and the children run out to meet
him. Luxuriant evening meal, cheer, 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.

Second house. 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, the second house? 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!" The second man. Lies in the jail
tonight. 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, the second
man? No—he is the same man! 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 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 eternal 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 has 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
someone 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 bar, 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 a taste of my wine." Three of his sons have died drunkards; and the
fourth is imbecile through intemperate habits.

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 as 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 this awful curse. It
throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced
Sheridan’s voice and shattered the golden scepter 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 gives 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. 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 leave 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 damned 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
is 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 bar, 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 dark bar—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 who gives his neighbor drink!" "Who has woe? Who has
sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has needless bruises? Who has
bloodshot eyes? Those who linger over wine, who go to sample bowls of mixed
wine. Do not gaze at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it
goes down smoothly! In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper!"
Proverbs 23:29-32


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  CHAPTER 12: 11 SWEARING
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SWEARING

Blasphemy is a crime that aims at God—but does its chief harm to the one who
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 backlash finds himself
in the dust.

I tell you a story, Oriental and marvelous. History speaks of the richest man in
all the East. He had camels, oxen, donkeys, 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 donkeys 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 your
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 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 today 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 hammer; 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 God—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 people conversing. Profanities
were so frequent in the conversation of the two people 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 people 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, practicing 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 curse word, 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. Curses 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 express 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 practicing 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 laborers does
not please you—what do you say? It is not praying, is it? Forthwith, your
laborers 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 swearing 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 imprecations! 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 fully 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 baseness or hypocrisy in all
the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition; and I will go on to denounce
the same baseness 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 tongue,—words pure, innocent, all-impressive,
God-honored; in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and Shakespeare wrote.
But whatever is 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 depot to get their morning grain; 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 which are enough to bring down upon
any city, the hurricane of fire which consumed Sodom! The habit is creeping up
into the higher circles. Every true 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 decency of speech is. They utter their oaths, and
recklessly speak the holiest of names, without the faintest blush. This is
helped on by the second glass of wine, which 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 astonishing that in the
court-house, 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 a solemn 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 is an oath? Anything solemn? Anything appealing to the Almighty? Anything
stupendous in man’s history? No! In a land where the name of God so often
becomes the football 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 of swearing—lowers, bedwarfs, and destroys the entire moral nature.
You might as well expect to raise harvests and vineyards on the side of a
belching volcano—as to have any great excellency grow upon your soul, when it so
often overflows with the scum of this awful propensity. You will never swear
yourself up. You can only 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 of
swearing. Did a volley of oaths ever move a heavy load? Did curses ever unravel
a tangled skein? Did they ever extirpate the baseness 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 medical 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 God. 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 tolerate this sin. He will not let it escape. There is a kind of
carbon 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 tonight? 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 tonight by hundreds of lips. The
grog-shops will curse him. The houses of shame 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 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 inhabitants. 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 which burns 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 into the bottomless pit 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,
shriveled, 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 tonight. 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 has 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, which flows in silence, except as the paddles
of pleasure-parties rattle them, 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. 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 the Housatonic slept as
quiet as a baby’s dream. Pillars of white cloud set up along the heavens looked
like the castles of the blessed, built for hierarchs of heaven on the beach of
the azure sea. The trees sparkled as though there had been some great joy 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.


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  CHAPTER 13: 12 LIES—WHITE AND BLACK
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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 "little white lies;" but there is really no
such thing as a little white lie. The whitest lie that was ever told—was as
black as perdition! No inventory of public crimes will be sufficient, which
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
scarlet-fever. 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 persistent 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 subterfuges, disguises, delusions, evasions, pretenses, fables,
deceptions, misrepresentations; 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 which are professional, social, and political—for some other chapter.

First, then, I will speak of those lies, which 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.

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 today 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 which 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 are thousands of fortunes made in commercial spheres that are thoroughly
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 item actually 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 is worth more, and, for
the sake of getting it for less than its value, you willfully 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, 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 jewelers, and lumbermen, and coal-merchants,
and stationers? 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. 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 willful making of promises that you know you cannot
keep. Did you say that that shoe would be mended, that coat repaired, those
bricks 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 which burns 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 astonishing 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 worshiper 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—they begin to denounce, and misrepresent, and falsify! 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!


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/de-witt-talmage-thomas-abominations-of-modern-society-wlue777/
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