ed. Look
out for the agitation that, like a rough musician, in bringing out the
tune, plays so hard 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 gaming-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 heired a large property, 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 road to hell,
and no preacher's voice, or startling warning, or wife's entreaty, can
make him stay for a moment his headlong career. The infernal spell
is on him; a giant is aroused within; and though you bind him with
cables, they would part 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
gaming-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 em
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