A few years ago our newspapers flamed with the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the Crosby Opera House scheme. A citizen of Chicago, finding on his hands an unprofitable building, calls upon the whole country to help him out. Rooms are opened in all the great cities. In rush, not the abandoned and the reprobate (for _they_ like the old styles of swindling better), but the educated and refined and polished, until a host of people are in imminent peril of having thrown upon their hands a splendid Opera House. Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars worth of tickets. The portentous day approaches. The rail trains from many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and Christian manner. The throng presses in. Hold fast your tickets, all you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the wheel begins to move. The long agony is over. Hundreds of thousands of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden affluence. Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up to the house of him who owns the successful ticket. The lightnings tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Mult.i.tudes 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 p.r.o.nounce the whole scheme to have been a swindle, a crime, and an insult to G.o.d and the nation.

In this cla.s.s 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 fict.i.tious articles and covered up our population with bra.s.s finger-rings, and despoiled the moral sense of the community, and is fast making us a nation of gamblers.

The Church of G.o.d has not seemed willing to allow the world to have all the advantage of these games of chance. A church fair opens, and towards the close it is found that some of the more valuable articles are unsalable. Forthwith the conductors of the enterprise conclude that they will _raffle_ for some of the valuable articles, and, under pretence of anxiety to make their minister a present, or please some popular member of the church, fascinating persons are despatched through the room, pencil in hand, to "solicit" shares; or perhaps each draws for his own advantage, and scores of people go home with their trophies, thinking that all is right, for Christian ladies did the embroidery, and Christian men did the raffling, and the proceeds went towards a new communion set. But you may depend on it that, as far as morality is concerned, you might as well have won by the crack of the billiard-ball or the turn of the dice-box.

Some good people cannot stand this raffling, and so, at fairs, they go to "voting," sometimes for editors, and sometimes for ministers, at a dollar a vote. Now the Methodist minister is ahead; now the Presbyterian leads, and now the Baptist. But, just at the last moment, when one of the ministers of the more popular sect seems sure to get the prize, the members from some obscure denomination, that do not deserve the prize, come in, and by a large contribution carry off for _their_ minister the silver tea-set.

Do you wonder that churches built, lighted, or upholstered by such processes as that come to great financial and spiritual decrepitude?

The devil says: "_I_ helped build that house of worship, and I have as much right there as you have;" and for once the devil is right.

We do not read that they had a lottery for building the church at Corinth or Antioch, or for getting up a gold-headed cane or for an embroidered surplice for Saint Paul. All this I style ecclesiastical gambling. More than one man who is destroyed can say that his first step on the wrong road was when he won something at a church fair.

The gambling spirit has not stopped for any indecency. There lately transpired, in Maryland, a lottery in which people drew for lots in a burying-ground! The modern habit of betting about everything is productive of immense mischief. The most healthful and innocent amus.e.m.e.nts of yachting and base-ball playing have been the occasion of putting up excited and extravagant wagers. That which to many has been advantageous to body and mind has been to others the means of financial and moral loss. The custom is pernicious in the extreme where scores of men in respectable life give themselves up to betting, now on this boat now on that--now on the Atlantics and now on the Athletics.

Betting, that once was chiefly the accompaniment of the race-course, is fast becoming a national habit, and in some circles any opinion advanced on finance or politics is accosted with the interrogatory--"How much will you bet on _that_, sir?"

This custom may make no appeal to slow, lethargic temperaments, but there are in the country tens of thousands of quick, nervous, sanguine, excitable temperaments ready to be acted upon, and their feet will soon take hold on death. For some months and perhaps for years they will linger in the more polite and elegant circle of gamesters, but, after a while, their pathway will come to the fatal plunge. Finding themselves in the rapids, they will try to back out, and, hurled over the brink, they will clutch the side of the boat until their finger-nails, blood-tipped, will pierce the wood, and then, with white cheek and agonized stare, and the horrors of the lost soul lifting the very hair from the scalp, they will plunge down where no grappling hooks can drag them out.

Young man! stand back from all styles of gambling! The end thereof is death. The gamblers enter the ten-pin alley where are husbands, brothers, and fathers. "Put down your thousand dollars all in gold eagles! Let the boy set up the pins at the other end of the alley! Now stand back, and give the gamester full sweep! Roll the first--there!

it strikes! and down goes his respectability. Try it again. Roll the second--there! it strikes! and down goes the last feeling of humanity.

Try it again. Roll the third--there! it strikes! and down goes his soul forever. It was not so much the pins that fell as the soul! the soul! FATAL TEN-STRIKE FOR ETERNITY!"

Shall I sketch the history of the gambler? Lured by bad company, he finds his way into a place where honest men ought never to go. He sits down to his first game only for pastime and the desire of being thought sociable. The players deal out the cards. They unconsciously play into Satan's hands, who takes all the tricks, and both the players' souls for trumps--he being a sharper at any game. A slight stake is put up just to add interest to the play. Game after game is played. Larger stakes and still larger. They begin to move nervously on their chairs. Their brows lower and eyes flash, until now they who win and they who lose, fired alike with pa.s.sion, sit with set jaws, and compressed lips, and clenched fists, and eyes like fire-b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sed, and he is only the wreck of a man. Seating himself at the game ere he throws the first card, he stakes the last relic of his wife, and the marriage-ring which sealed the solemn vows between them. The game is lost, and, staggering back in exhaustion, he dreams. The bright hours of the past mock his agony, and in his dreams, fiends, with eyes of fire and tongues of flame, circle about him with joined hands, to dance and sing their orgies with h.e.l.lish chorus, chanting--"Hail! brother!" kissing his clammy forehead until their loathsome locks, flowing with serpents, crawl into his bosom and sink their sharp fangs and suck up his life's blood, and coiling around his heart pinch it with chills and shudders unutterable.

Take warning! You are no stronger than tens of thousands who have, by this practice, been overthrown. No young man in our cities can escape being tempted. _Beware of the first beginnings!_ This road is a down-grade, and every instant increases the momentum. Launch not upon this treacherous sea. Split hulks strew the beach. Everlasting storms howl up and down, tossing the unwary crafts into the h.e.l.l-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 a.s.sociates come not nigh his dwelling. When the hour comes, his miserable soul will go out of a miserable life into a miserable eternity. As his poor remains pa.s.s the house where he was ruined, old companions may look out a moment and say--"There goes the old carca.s.s--dead at last," but they will not get up from the table.

Let him down now into his grave. Plant no tree to cast its shade there, for the long, deep, eternal gloom that settles there is shadow enough. Plant no "forget-me-nots" or eglantines around the spot, for flowers were not made to grow on such a blasted heath. Visit it not in the sunshine, for that would be mockery, but in the dismal night, when no stars are out, and the spirits of darkness come down horsed on the wind, _then_ visit the grave of the gambler!

SOME OF THE CLUB-HOUSES.

Iniquity never gives a fair fight. It springs out from ambush upon the unsuspecting. Of the tens of thousands who have fallen into bad habits, not one deliberately leaped off, but all were caught in some sly trap. You may have watched a panther or a cat about to take its prey. It crouches down, puts its mouth between its paws, and is hardly to be seen in the long gra.s.s. So iniquity always crouches down in unexpected shapes, takes aim with unerring eye, and then springs upon you with sudden and terrific leap. In secret places and in unlooked-for shapes it murders the innocent.

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

Men in social circles. You may, by the discharge of a gun, scatter a flock of quails, or by the plunge of the anchor send apart the denizens of the sea; but they will gather themselves together again.

If you, by some new power, could break the a.s.sociations in which men now stand, they would again adhere. G.o.d meant it so. He has gathered all the flowers and shrubs into a.s.sociations. You may plant one "forget-me-not" or "hearts-ease" alone, away off upon the hillside, but it will soon hunt up some other "forget-me-not" or "hearts-ease."

Plants love company; you will find them talking to each other in the dew. A galaxy of stars is only a mutual life-insurance company. You sometimes see a man with no out-branchings of sympathy. His nature is cold and hard, like a ship's mast, ice-glazed, which the most agile sailor could never climb. Others have a thousand roots and a thousand branches. Innumerable tendrils climb their hearts, and blossom all the way up; and the fowls of heaven sing in the branches.

In consequence of this tendency, we find men coming together in tribes, in communities, in churches, in societies. Some gather together to cultivate the arts; some to plan for the welfare of the State; some to discuss religious themes; some to kindle their mirth; some to advance their craft. So every active community is divided into a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sociations that do their work with closed doors, and admit their members by pa.s.s-words, and greet each other with a secret grip, are right or wrong. I answer that it depends entirely upon the nature of the object for which they meet. Is it to pa.s.s the hours in revelry, wa.s.sail, blasphemy, and obscene talk, or to plot trouble to the State, or to debauch the innocent? Then I say, with an emphasis that no man can mistake, "NO." But is the object the improvement of the mind, or the enlargement of the heart, or the advancement of art, or the defence of the government, or the extirpation of crime, or the kindling of a pure-hearted sociality? Then I say, with just as much emphasis, "YES."

There is no need that we who plan for the conquest of right over wrong should publish to all the world our intentions. The general of an army never sends to the opposing troops information as to the coming attack. Shall we who have enlisted in the cause of G.o.d and humanity expose our plans to the enemy? No! We will in secret plot the ruin of all the enterprises of Satan and his cohorts. When they expect us by day, we will fall upon them by night. While they are strengthening their left wing, we will double up their right. By a plan of battle formed in secret conclave, we will come suddenly upon them, crying: "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!"

Secrecy of plot and execution are wrong only when the object and influence are nefarious. Every family is a secret society; every business firm, and every banking and insurance inst.i.tution. 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 a.s.sociations which have for their object the reclamation of inebriates, or like the score of mutual benefit societies, called by different names, that provide temporary relief for widows and orphans, and for men incapacitated by sickness or accident for earning a livelihood.

I suppose there are club-houses in our cities to which men go with clear consciences, and from which they come after an hour or two of intellectual talk, and cheerful interview, to enjoy the domestic circle. But that this is not the character of scores and hundreds of club-houses we all know. Can I, then, pa.s.s this subject by without exposition of the monstrous evil? There are mult.i.tudes who are unconsciously having their physical, moral, and eternal well-being endangered by club-room dissipation. Was it right to expose the plot of Guy Fawkes, by which he would have destroyed the Parliament of England? And am I wrong in disclosing a peril which threatens not only your well-being here, but your throne in heaven?

I deplore this ruin the more because this style of dissipation is taking down our finest men. The admission-fee sifts out the penurious and takes only those who are called the best fellows. Oh! how changed you are! Not so kind to your wife as you used to be; not so patient with your children. Your conscience is not so much at rest. You laugh more now, and sing louder than once, but are not half so happy. It is not the public drinking-saloon that is taking you down, nor theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts, nor the houses of sin that have cost thousands of other men their eternity: but it is simply and undeniably your club-room.

You do not make yourself as agreeable in your family as once. You go home at twelve o'clock with an unnatural flush upon your cheek and a strange color in your eye that you got at the club. You merely acknowledge that you feel queer. You say that champagne never intoxicates; that it only exhilarates, makes the conversation fluent, shakes up the humor, and has no bad effect except a headache next day.

Be not deceived. Champagne may not, like whiskey, throw a man under the table; but if, through anything you drink, you gain an unnatural fluency of speech and glow of feeling, you are simply drunk.

If those imperilled were heartless young men, stingy young men, I would not be so sorry as I am; but there are many of them generous to a fault, frank, honest, cheerful, talented. I begrudge the devil such a prize. After a while these persons will lose all the frankness and honor for which they are now distinguished. Their countenances will get haggard, and instead of looking one in the eye when they talk, they will look down. After a while, when the mother kindly asks, "What kept you out so late?" they will make no answer, or will say "That is my business!" They will come cross and befogged to the store and bank, and ever and anon neglect some duty, and after a while will be dismissed: and then, with nothing to do, will rise in the morning at ten o'clock, cursing the servant because the breakfast is cold, and then go down town and stand on the steps of a fashionable hotel, and criticise the pa.s.sers-by. While the young man who was a clerk in a cellar has come up to be the first clerk, and he who a few years ago ran errands for the bank has got to be cashier, and thousands of other young men of the city have gone up to higher and more responsible positions, he has been going down, until there he pa.s.ses through the street with bloated lip, and bloodshot eye, and staggering step, and hat mud-spattered and set sidewise on a shock of greasy hair, the ashes of his cigar dashed upon his cravat. Here he goes! Look at him, all ye pure-hearted young men, and see the work of the fashionable club-room. I knew one such who, after the contaminations of his club-house, leaped out of the third-story window to put an end to his wretchedness.

Many who would not be seen drinking at the bar of a restaurant, think there is no dishonor and no peril connected with sitting down at a marble stand in an elegantly furnished parlor, to which they go with a private key, and where none are present except gentlemen as elegant as themselves. Everything so chaste in the surroundings! Soft carpets, beautiful pictures, cut gla.s.s, Italian top tables, frescoed walls. In just such places there are thousands of young men, middle-aged men, and old men, preparing themselves for overthrow.

In many of these club-rooms the talk is not as pure and elevated as it might be. How is it, men and brothers, at half-past eleven o'clock, when the tankards are well emptied, and the smoke curls up from every lip? Do they ever swear? Are there stories told unworthy a man who venerates the name of his mother? Does G.o.d, whose presence cannot be hindered by bolt, and who comes in without a pa.s.s-word, and is making up His record for the judgment-day, approve of the blasphemies you utter?

You think that there is no special danger, yet acknowledge that you have felt _queer_ sometimes. Your head was not right, and your stomach was disturbed. I will tell you what was the matter. _You were drunk_.

You understood not that protracted hiccough; it was the drunkard's hiccough. You could not explain that nausea; it was the drunkard's vomit. The fact is that some of you, who have never in your own eyes or in the eyes of others fully sacrificed your respectability, have for six months been written down in G.o.d's book as drunkards.

How far down need a man go before he becomes an inebriate? Must he fall into the ditch? No! Must he get into a porter-house fight? No!

Must he be senseless in the street? Must he have the delirium tremens? No! He may wear satin and fine linen; he may walk with hat scrupulously brushed; may swing a gold-headed cane, and step in boots of French leather, dismount from a carriage, or draw tight rein over a swift, sleek, high-mettled, full-blooded Arabian span, but yet be so thoroughly under the power of strong drink that he is utterly offensive to his Maker and rotten as a heap of compost.

The fact that this whole land to-day swelters with drunkenness I charge upon the drinking club houses. They wield an influence that makes it respectable, and I will not put my head to the pillow to-night until I have written against them one burning anathema maranatha! When I see them dragging down scores of our young men, and slaying professed Christians at the very altar, and s.n.a.t.c.hing off the garlands of life from those who would otherwise reign forever and forever, I tell you I hate them with a perfect hatred, and pray for more height, and depth, and length, and breadth of capacity with which to hate them.

Along this blossoming and over-arched pathway, and through this long line of temptations that throw their garlands upon the brow, and ring their music into the ear, go a great host.

No one can estimate the homes that have been shattered by the dissipations of the club-house. There are weak women who would never consent to a husband's absence in the evening, however important the duty that takes him away. Any man who wishes to take his share of the public burdens and is willing to work for the political, educational, and social advancement of the community must of necessity spend some of his evenings away from home. There are a.s.sociations 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, instruction, and improvement of the household.

But I describe the history of thousands of households when I say that the tea is rapidly taken, and while yet the family linger the father shoves back his chair, has "an engagement," lights his cigar and starts out, not returning until after midnight. That is the history of three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, except when he is sick and cannot get out.

How about home duties? Have you fulfilled all your vows? Would your wife ever have married you with such a prospect? Wait until your sons get to be sixteen or seventeen years of age, and they too will shove back from the tea-table, have an "engagement," light their cigars, go over to their club-houses, their night-key rattling in your door after midnight--the effect of your example. And as your son's const.i.tution may not be as strong as yours, and the liquor he drinks more terribly drugged, he will catch up with you on the road to death although you got the start of him. And so you will both go to h.e.l.l together! A revolving Drummond-light on the front of a locomotive casts its gleam through the darkness as it is turned around; so I catch up the lamp of G.o.d's truth and turn it round until its tremendous glare flashes into all the club-houses of our cities.

Flee the presence of the dissipating club-houses. "Paid your money?"

Sacrifice that rather than your soul. "Good fellows," are they? They cannot stay what they are under such influences. Mollusca live two hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag grows fat on the stunted growth of Altaian peaks. The Hedysarium thrives amid the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot lips of volcanic Schneehalten. But good character and a useful life thrive amid club-room dissipations--_Never!_

The best way to make a wild beast cower is to look him in the eye, but the best way to treat the temptations I have described is to turn your back and fly! O! my heart aches! I see men struggling to get out of the serfdom of bad habits, and I want to help them. I have knelt with them and heard their cry for help. I have had them put one hand on each of my shoulders, and look me in the eye, with an agony of earnestness that the judgment shall have no power to make me forget, and from their lips, scorched with the fires of ruin, have heard them cry "G.o.d 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 f.a.gots, and the fire bursts through and up, and out, gay of flash, gay of crackle--emblem of boyhood. Then the fire reddens into coals. The heat is fiercer; and the more it is stirred, the more it reddens. With sweep of flame it cleaves its way, until all the hearth glows with the intensity--emblem of full manhood. Then comes a whiteness to the coals. The heat lessens. The flickering shadows have died along the wall. The f.a.gots drop apart. The household hover over the expiring embers. The last breath of smoke has been lost in the chimney. Fire is out. Shovel up the white remains. ASHES!

FLASK, BOTTLE, AND DEMIJOHN.