from the wine-glasses in the parlor;
and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccups at his
elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" asked the first man who reddened his hands
with the violated life of a man; and the answer came crying upward in a
voice of blood from the ground. "Am I my brother's keeper?" _you_ ask,
perhaps, with a tone of surprise or scorn. _You_ ask O! respectable
gentleman or lady; O! man in the thick of business; O! self-indulgent
Epicurean;--and the answer comes to you not from the ground merely, but
from the universal air--the answer of kindred pulses, of confluent
sympathies, of an inseparable humanity--though it swarms in rags, and
riots in shame, and seems far off from you in its hell of debasement and
despair. Nay, perhaps the answer comes very _near_ to you. It may come
from some one of your own household. You may ask--"Who has tempted even
my very child?" Ask _Yourself_--"Need he have gone outside this very
door to find temptation?" Ah! perhaps you are not merely an Ally of the
Tempter, but have furnished conscripts for his vast army. Your children
perhaps will rise up and call you--_not_ "blessed." And see, too, what
kind of conscripts the Tempter draws from the ranks of respectable and
especially of fashionable life. Mere striplings, so dwarfed and dwindled
by precocious dissipation that they look like feeble specimens of
wax-work; whose faculties--the evident product of a thin soil--have been
developed by bottles of wine and fast horses; whose memories are too
short to remember their parents; whose ideas are too artificial to touch
any genuine spring of nature; who are ashamed of true manliness, and
make a miserable farce of what they _call_ "manliness;" and who, as
they parade the streets, make up a sort of bombastic interlude in the
drama of "Young America."

But, whatever view we may take of this general subject, it is evident
that we cannot easily exaggerate the influence of "respectable and
fashionable" customs upon the forces of temptation. And, surely, it
becomes each of us to consider the tendencies of his own example, and
ask--"Is it toward the right or the wrong? Is it for, or against the
good?"

Again, the Tempter finds help from our _indifference_. This, indeed, may
be the qualification which should be applied to the remarks I have just
made. It is not to be supposed that the evil influences which go out
from