GAMES OF CHANCE AS AN AMUSEMENT.

WE

BY REV. B. H. NADAL, D. D.

E come not here to declaim against gambling, much less is it our intention to attempt to prove that flagrant enormity to be a crime. As soon would we think it needful to prove the sinfulness of highway robbery or piracy. A highwayman meets his victim at midnight and a scuffle ensues between them; if the highwayman prove the stronger he carries away the money of the other. Two men sit down to gamble-a scuffle, not of muscles and sinews, but of skill and cunning, ensues, and the more cunning carries off the stakes. The gambler has no more earned, and, in justice, no more owns his antagonist's money than the highwayman that of his victim. The supposition upon which legitimate and honest trade is based is, that the particular employments are lawful in themselves, and that the transfers of money and property made are a mutual advantage to the parties concerned; but in gambling, as in robbery, one party can only be enriched by impoverishing the other. A merchant gives dry-goods or groceries and receives money, a mechanic builds a house and receives his wages; but gamblers make no exchanges, they get all and return nothing.

Gambling proper being thus based upon dishonesty its criminality does not need proof, but denunciation and exposure. Those who are in danger of becoming its victims must be warned of its allurements, and these allurements must be pointed out. The wisdom and virtue of the legislature must deal with it, and the strong arm of public justice must bring its degraded devotees to light and to punishment.

Leaving professional gamblers, then, in their proper place, among thieves, and regular gambling where the ancient Church put it, namely,

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among the other violations of the commandment, "thou shalt not steal," we proceed to show the danger and wrong of using the instruments and games of the gambler, though it be merely for amusement. Not only may we not enter the gambling hells, we must not even play about the doors; not only may we not play with the gamblers, we should not even use their games among ourselves; not only must we not converse with them, we must not even adopt their dialect at our own firesides. We include under the phrase " games of chance" those games which are usually em ployed for gambling, whether the sums staked be large or small; but as cards, used in a great variety of ways and in manifold combinations, are the chief instruments of gambling, as well as a sort of symbolic expression for all games of chance, we shall speak chiefly of the games played with them.

Our first argument is, that almost all unsophisticated, honest, upright people have a dread of gambling, a sort of indefinable shrinking from it, which they readily and usually transfer to the games themselves, and to the very cards by which the games are carried on. Such persons would feel that a pack of cards placed within the leaves of a Bible was like Satan appearing among the sons of God; that a game of whist on a tombstone, however reverential and devout the players might claim to be, would be a sacrilege, to be punished by a Divine judgment in the form of blasting, lightning, or shriveling palsy; that cards laid on the mantle of their chamber and remembered after blowing out the light and retiring alone would not greatly promote sleep. In short, there is a common feeling among unsophisticated people, you may, if you will, call it foolish-a feeling of intense hostility to cards, which I myself am proud to share-a feeling which sees blood in the red spots, and sin in the black ones on