CHAPTER II.

TEMPTATIONS.

There are many vicious practices which, arrayed in deceitful garbs, present themselves to young men, and frequently allure them to ruin. These temptations throng around the young in their most alluring forms, and invite them to participate in what they would cause you to believe are their enjoyments. But, young men, beware of them—beware! Although they appear before you in the garb of friendship—although they address you in sweet and fascinating tones—yet, in reality, they are your foes—your most bitter, fatal, deadly enemies! They come to you under the specious pretence of improving your condition, of affording you enjoyment, of leading you into those fair and beautiful fields of pleasure, which are spread out invitingly before you. But, mark me! all their pretences are false--all their promises are baseless and empty—and those gorgeous pictures which they so vividly paint to your glowing imagination, are as illusory and vain, as the fleet11*

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ing visions of the midnight dream. In their every attempt to bestow enjoyment upon you, their highest success can be but a fitful excitement, which will inflict a real sting, a real poison, to your true happiness and peace. Were these temptations to present themselves in their true colors—were their real features visible—youth would reject them instantly.

"Vice is a monster of so frightful moin,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen."

When vice is seen in its real nature and results, it is universally hated. It is only by the disguise which temptations assume, the tinsel trappings with which they conceal their hideous features, that they are enabled to deceive any. When young men see these temptations in the grosser aspects they assume to their confirmed victims, or discover their ulterior and certain results, they start back with disgust and horror. The youth who beholds the drunkard rolling in the mire, and hears his children cry for bread—or sees the profligate bloated with disease, or the thief in prison, or the murderer upon the gallows—has no inclination to be degraded to these conditions; and has no apprehension that such will ever be his circumstances. And such, indeed, would never be his condition, were he but considerately to trace these disastrous results back to their real origin. But herein lies the danger of youth. It is difficult to convince the young men, that harmless temptations, as he imagines them, which are so

pleasing and enticing to his imagination, are the cause of so much pain, and wretchedness, and ruin. I beseech all candid young men to be consistent upon this subject. If you would know the real effect of giving way to early, and even trivial temptations, go and question the miserable Victims of vice. Amid groans of anguish and unavailing regrets, they will trace to you the history of their career, recorded in the annals of infamy and shame. They will lead you back, step by step, the downward road they pursued. They will assure you, that the vices which eventually plunged them into ruin, presented themselves to their view, in youth, in the same pleasing colors, with the same harmless, inoffensive air, that they now appear to you. They believed these lying, deceitful appearances—they followed the gilded shadows —they plunged deep into the vortex of misnamed pleasure, and, ere long, they awoke involved in the severest anguish and despair!

Young men, will you not take warning by the living records of crime, which are every where scattered around? Will you wisely scrutinize the temptations that beset you, and perceive their ruinous effects, and withstand them? Or will you give way to their fascinations, and recklessly rush onward in the foolharay career, run by so many of your race, to awaken to the same degradation and anguish? Be not so vain as to flatter yourself that you can indulge in sinful practices, and avoid those dreadful consequences which

they have invariably entailed upon all who have been guilty of them. By what reasonable rule can you calculate that the laws of God, of nature, and of man, will change their mode of operation, and relent in their principles and exactions, in your behalf, when, to all others they are undeviatingly and rigidly certain? Indulge not, for a moment, these ignorant suppositions. Like causes must produce like effects. If by giving way to early temptations, others have rapidly become involved in wretchedness and ruin as you well know, the same fate unavoidably awaits you, if you imitate their example.

I will briefly notice a few of the temptations by which young men are liable to be beset..

Gambling is a temptation to which young men are exposed. This practice is unjust. It is unjust to take the property of another, without returning a proper equivalent therefor—it amounts to robbery; this the gamester does. Gambling is unlawful. No just law can sanction or tolerate it. Laws were passed against it, as early as the reign of Queen Anne, of England. And from that period to the present, in all well regulated communities, this practice has been forbidden by law. It is an unprofitable occupation. "It is certain," says Locke, "that gaming leaves no satisfaction behind it, to those who reflect when it is over; and it no way profits either body or mind. As to their estates, if it strike so deep as to concern them, it is a trade, then, and not a

recreation, wherein few thrive; and, at best, a thriving gamester has but a poor trade of it, who fills his pockets at the price of his reputation."

Gambling is opposed to industry. Those who 'occasionally win sums of money by the turn of a card, or the throw of a die, soon acquire a distaste to the slower routine of acquiring property by industrious occupation. It begets in them a feverish desire to become wealthy in a moment, which spurns a more tardy yet surer process.

The

Gambling is ruinous in all its tendencies and consequences. It is ruinous to character. gamester is despised by the virtuous and enlightened, and suspected even by his associates. To be connected with him, or to associate with him, is a disgrace, and his society is shunned by all those who would be considered respectable. He is distrusted by all; for it is consistently deemed probable, that he who will filch from another his lawful property, at the gaming table, will not hesitate to take any other measures, however vicious or unlawful, to accomplish the same object. It is ruinous to morals. Its tendencies are to blunt the sensibilities as to those nice distinctions of right and wrong, so necessary to preserve purity of morals. The gamester soon loses all regard for truth, honesty and candor, and is compelled to resort to falsehood and deception to obtain his object. This pernicious practice is the fruitful source of every conceivable vice and crime. Its natural fruit is theft, robbery, murder,