with the manifestations of its power; and when you take this passion, and set before it the prospect of a sudden accumulation, with small hazard and little toil, then how is it aggravated and its power over the whole man increased, until often the judgment is dethroned, and a frenzy that listens to no voice of reason or affection, takes full possession of the mind. How many rushed to California under the excitement of this passion, in a state which forbid the exercise of reason, which insured the overthrow of judgment? How often, in the world's history, have men precipitated themselves into wild speculations, and in the excitement of some grand scheme for the obtaining of an immediate and untoiled for wealth, regarded all the landmarks of experience, and all the guides of a sober reason, as fools and deceivers? Now, in gambling you enlist this dangerous excitability of our nature; you set before it wealth easily gained; you excite hope, and kindle the imagination, until the man has no power to look at the other side of the picture. The judgment is prostrated, and the reason despoiled of its authority, by an overmastering excitement; and when to this you add the desire of victory, the passion of conquest, which has wrought such amazing deeds, and carried men on to such astonishing feats of daring and heroism, and borne them up under the most severe sufferings, and given endurance to the greatest privations, then you combine the elements of excitement, and by their action, one upon the other, they serve as mutual stimulants-they rouse and sustain each other in the work of bringing the whole soul of the gambler into the most complete and terrible slavery. God has given us elements of excitement-the temperament and the passions which, when roused and guided by principles in a good cause, are mighty to effect great and good things,

but which, separated from principle, and called forth in an evil cause, are just as powerful over the man, and just as mighty to effect the things that are evil. They are instruments designed of Heaven for good, and essential to progress in excellence, and all great and virtuous deeds. But when men use them in a bad cause, they will work for them with the same force, and accelerate all the advances of folly and wickedness, and bear up all the toils of sin with an insane energy. The gambler rouses them to do his work, and makes them powerful to seduce the young, and the unwary, and the inexperienced into his toils. Himself their poor slave, he seeks to make others slaves to the same unrelenting and unpitying masters.

I have thus stated to you the principles and the sources of the power of gambling. Listen to me now, as I endeavor to show you its results, and by the streams that flow from it, justify all I have said respecting their fountain. And here I need not say that, in remarking on the evils of this vice, I shall speak of those which it uniformly tends to produce, and of those which it does produce when it has fullest sway over the heart, and has time to form the habits and dispositions of those who are its subjects. We must take the ripe fruit if we would judge of the nature of the tree; and we must take the more fully developed habits, and passions, and manners of life which gaming generates in its most accomplished votaries, in order to see its real character.

And, first, let me mention its most generic and evil consequence, the one which is the parent and the associate of all the others. Gambling depraves the moral principles, and cuts a man loose from those right dispositions which are the strongest anchor to him in this world. It depraves his moral nature. The two great principles which underlie all gambling, are themselves

the bitterest foes of whatever is good and excellent. The lust of unjust gain and the lust of victory, as they become ascendant in the soul, necessarily war with all that is good and peaceful-with all that is noble in motive and excellent in feeling. In the very act of indulging them he swings loose from the moorings of virtue and casts himself forth upon the boisterous and turbid sea of every evil passion. There is an intimate connection between good principles, which compels a man, if he would hold firmly to one, he must to all-which obliges him to maintain the whole in their mutual dependence, and so they will together hold him up from the descent into the pit of vice. And there is just as much an intimate connection between all vicious principles; so that if a man adopts one or two of them, there is a wonderful proclivity in his nature to adopt them all. The moment he can cast down the principle of justice and surrender himself to the lust of gain and conquest, that moment his whole moral nature has received a fearful shock; every good principle feels the power of the assault, and all that is evil acquires new energy. Gambling associates itself with only depraved and corrupt propensities; it assaults every virtue directly or indirectly; it stimulates all that is evil within us; it counteracts the good influence which might come to our help; it insidiously saps every virtuous habit and every moral disposition; it enervates the purpose of rectitude and alienates the heart from all that is pure, and noble, and lovely, and manly. Justice it opposes from its very nature; benevolence it laughs at; mercy it scorns; the good of society it ridicules; God and good men it abhors more than all things else. There is nothing in it adapted to develop a noble, a manly, a Christian character; there is everything in it to overturn such a character and

give the most abominable principles full sway over the

man.

But let us descend to particulars. Among its foremost evils is its tendency to generate habits of idleness and destroy all steadiness in the pursuit of an honest industry. The power of any overmastering excitement, in another direction, invariably tends to withdraw the mind from its own more sober and quiet pursuits. But when that exists in the direction of a personal interest, it often has a tenfold influence to divert us from the objects which claim immediate attention. And such is the fascination of gambling and such the power it wields over the feelings, that it destroys the love of quiet labor, and makes the slow processes of industry irksome. It ministers to a feverish excitement of the whole system, by which the soul is incapacitated for pursuing the calm and cool path of a virtuous and industrious life. It craves the stimulus of the gaming-table; it thirsts for the intense excitements of the strife and the victory; it is bewildered and bewitched by the imagination of a fortune to be made; or it is lashed to fury by the mortification of defeat, and goaded on to another and another attempt to overtake the splendid illusion. Can such a mind set itself down to labor, and plan, and study, and work with an intense energy and exclusive attention to one pursuit and remain unaffected by the enervating vision of the card-table? How many habits of industry has it broken up? How many who, had they gone forward in the path of honorable labor, would have gained competence and peace, and shed around them the blessings of a moral life, have been utterly shipwrecked by the habit of occasional gambling? How many bright intellects have through this insane excitement been despoiled of their power and stripped of their crown of

glory, and have descended to the grave, the skeletons of a former greatness? What might not Charles James Fox have been? what might he not have attained in the English court? what mighty works lustrous and abiding might he not have effected for his country, for literature, and for the world, had not his genius been shattered, and his powers enervated, and his magnificent eloquence hushed, and his moral character debased, and his memory defiled by this abominable vice? And where is the man, young or old, the judge, the lawyer, the merchant, the student, the mechanic, the physician, that can subject himself to its power and at the same time keep all his faculties in full health and vigor for the industrial pursuits of life? Ah! there is in all vice, but especially in this vice, a disturbing force of evil that, so far as it prevails, tends to absorb the whole soul in itself and shut out all other things, that in any way interfere with the gratification of this passion. I may go farther and declare that it unfits the man to be a good husband or a good father; that all its influence tends to enthrone itself as an absorbing passion, until wife and children are neglected and shut out from the sympathies and strongest affections of the mature gambler. There is a curse in it which vitiates the fountains of a healthful industry and a pure domestic affection, and makes the heart susceptible of only one great passion and binds the soul down to one master excitement.

Next I would have you notice that gambling leads on to dishonesty. It begins in injustice; it lets loose the fiercest excitements to which the soul is subject, and so tends directly to destroy all sense of justice. The mind of the gambler becomes blind to the distinctions of virtue and vice; if successful, the excitement of gain drowns the voice of conscience; if unsuccessful, the secret sense