An organ beneath his room strikes up an air heavy with old memories; the tune of “The Old Folks at Home,” quavers through his window. With a shuddering cry—“A gambler! a gambler! Oh, God, be merciful; let me die,” he falls by the bedside and burning tears are vain to staunch the hurt in his heart.
He is now in a whirlpool; return seems impossible. You have seen an apple tree in May, rosy in pink and white blossoms, murmurous with bees, glad with birds and glorious with sunshine. In one night the frost kills the bloom; next day the tree hangs with damp, blighted blossoms and blackened buds, an unlovely spectacle.
Few escape the bitter end who begin a gamester’s career.
Next we find him in snuggeries, curtained from basement bar-rooms, studying the cards at midnight, robbing unwary verdants. Conscience is seared as with a hot iron. His heart is flint. He strives with drink to banish thoughts of home, heaven and God; grows morose, cunning, merciless; works a little, hurries again to the feverish excitement of the game, herds with greasy disreputables in foul dens, amid the reek of pipes and hideous blasphemy. Soiled, ill-kempt, rag-clad, he nears the bottom of the slant. One night, crazed with vile rum, he mingles in a fight with fellow outcasts; blood is shed; the alarm brings the clattering patrol wagon, and through the red of early dawn he rides to a cell in murderer’s row. Convicted, condemned, he goes to prison for life—years pass—his sorrowing parents think him dead. He is dead. He died that night when he climbed the stairs to “Old Brad’s den.”
His post is to open and close a gate in the prison yard. Seven years in stripes, taciturn, sullen, he stands there. His soul starves, his heart stagnates, his face becomes stupidly half-human, despair feeds on his mind.
One day two visiting gentlemen see him, they recognize him and speak, holding out a hand which he will not take, trying to stir hope within him. They talk to him of freedom and home. He makes no sign of pleasure; hopeless vacuity rests on his imbruted face. He stares at his gate, shuts it, and says, “Seven years dead, seven years dead.” There he stands, and will stand, till carried to the little graveyard of the prison, touching at last the lowest level of the slant on which the gambler stands.
I charge you with a jealous affection, born of an unfeigned brotherhood, and based on many years study of the effects of this vice. Beware of the beginning of gambling. Have no commerce with the monster iniquity.
First of all, because it dethrones God. Seek its victims in the ranks of bankrupt merchants, in the cells of criminals, in the cellars of shame, or garrets of poverty; talk with them, or with those who have suffered through them, and you will find that the sad sequence of misery began with this heinous affront to God, viz: a practical denial of His very existence and a setting up in His place a blind deity called Chance, before whom they bowed, and on whose favor they risked their all. Even if in their darkened minds the votaries of gaming allow God to exist, they deny His government of the affairs of men. They flee away from all works that can win the help of Jehovah, and ask only the help of fortune. This is heathenry of the worst sort. The farmer plows, plants, cultivates, and hopes that the God of nature will help him by sending sun, rain and dew, that together they may produce the harvest. The sailor, by the march of the constellations and the veracity of the magnetic needle which God offers for his guidance, comes at last to port. The mason builds his wall by the laws of God, and his plumb line and level bear eloquent witness that he wishes to base his work on the certain laws which steadfastly bind the worlds together. These men, however much they ignore God in their speech, keep faith with Him in their work, knowing full well that they can only succeed in any task by keeping in line with His laws. Thus they have yoked the elements to the car of progress. The gambler, however, mocks at God’s laws and insolently banishes Him. He asks no help from fixed laws ordained by the Father to bless his children; he scorns the co-operation of Nature, sets up a fetish called Fortune, and grovelling, courts its smiles. I know of no form of paganism more base than this, and it is not surprising that in the worship of this block-eyed god, the most obscene rites and debasing superstitions are practiced. Dreams, charms, spells, incantations, black art, even the help of the powers of darkness have been used in wooing his favor. The most frightful depths of moral and mental depravity are touched in this shameful business. The negro who sells stolen articles to buy lottery tickets has some gruesome cabalistic secret which he fondly hopes will bring the favor of fortune; the lady who cons the dream-book in her room to learn which number to buy, and fancies her night vision of a gallows tree or a burning Bible will bring propitious fate, are alike far from reason and from God.
Frogs, spiders, beetles, graveyard grass, rabbits killed in burial places, pieces cut from a shroud or slivers from a coffin will insure winnings. Some put the ticket in the cold hand of a corpse, and the lowest level of blasphemous sacrilege is touched when the bread of the sacrament is carried secretly home to be used as a sort of magic aid to conjure the desired gain. Can anything more awful be conceived by the human mind—nay, could the most malignant devil desire a more direct insult to God than this? First the Creator is asked to abdicate His throne to this monstrous usurper, then the sacred symbols of His Son’s sacrificial death are offered to propitiate the unclean and unholy thing set up in His place. This is the iniquity of Balshazar’s feast repeated in our time. The sacred vessels of His holy worship are employed in the service of sensual lust or abandoned carnality. What shall be the outcome of all this depravity? If these souls seeking the brief success of the gamester deliberately turn away from God and practice harlotry with the princes of hell, wantoning with the powers of the pit in unblushing shame, who will paint their last estate when his vengeance finds them out?
The traveller in Egypt who explores with Arab guides the dismal mummy pits by the Nile finds some startling experiences in these caverns of the dead. More fearsome than the dark labyrinths where the bodies lie wrapped in linen and smeared with ghastly hideousness, more terrible than the gloomy grottos where cadavorous mortality swathed in silence waits the resurrection trump, is that grisly cave where the bats, the unclean birds, make their home. Into this the hardiest guides dare not go. The uncanny creatures invade it in myriads, and with their fluttering, furry vans, would quench the light and drive out the bravest intruder. If one desires a sight of these birds, he stands in the sunlight at noon close to the rocky ledge which walls the gardens of the Pharoahs. A shiek, musket in hand, steps a few paces into the vault. His gun is fired directly into the Plutonian chamber with a roar as if an earthquake was shaking the knees of the eternal hills. Then a dark torrent of winged things, with a sound as of a mighty wind, sweeps out into the light, fluttering the sweet air into horror with leathern wings. They fly about in circles and dart back, pained and dazzled by the light, into their obscene home. Some in blindness, eager to escape the sun, dash themselves against the rocky lintel and posts of the entrance, and fall broken and mangled at your feet, as tremblingly you shrink from the bruised clots fluttering in dying spasms about you.