Betting and Gambling by Christian Union

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 30, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 29.

Betting and Gambling.

By Christian Union

ONE of the most potential, subtle, and widespread passions of the day is the spirit of gambling. It pervades all classes, it enters all doors. Not many years ago one sporting paper—of which respectable people knew nothing—was a sufficient organ for the craft; how many now of the kind does New York alone publish? And besides these official mouth-pieces, large spaces in the daily papers are occupied in chronicling the doings on the race-courses, the bets in the billiard saloons, the result of "sparring" and "bruising," and walking matches.

Our cities are also full of men who lounge about street corners and the bars and lobbies of hotels, picking up the "strait tips" for the morrow's race. They are betting men, who have nothing else to do, who would not do it if they had, who live by "preying" on their fellow creatures. And one of the saddest things about this army of social bandits is the youthfulness of its personnel. All of them could do honest work if they would. Is it not a shameful and astounding thing that thousands of men can be profoundly exercised about the weight of a jockey, and consider the "going" mettle of a colt the grandest fact extant? Why? Not because they are sportsmen in any natural or honest sense of the word, but because they expect by the mere magic of the horse's name to clear more money in one shameful transaction than many a preacher or professor gets for a year's hard labor.

And it is not only on the race-course, at the green tables of the billiard-room, at "rings," and "mains" and "bars," in club-houses and drinking saloons, that betting and gambling are to be found. Its slang is heard in all the highways and byways of life, in schools, and in households; it mingles in the affairs of religion and the business of the church. What are lotteries for the building of churches, etc., but gambling? Will calling the church after some saint, or dedicating it with splendid ceremonies, ever make the place "holy"? Have we received any new dispensation by which it is lawful for us to do evil that good may come?

The "operations" which, in money and bonds, form a great proportion of the day's business, and influence immensely the city's legitimate trading, are not, perhaps, illegal, but they are unholy; for it is money made without labor, or obtained without equivalent from the incautious, the ignorant, or the unfortunate. And if the material of this legalized gambling could be traced to its source, it would too often be found to have come from the safes of employers, the pocket-books of country traders and farmers, who jeopardize their lawful gains for the chance of unreasonable returns, and so deserve the ruin they find. It is the product of fraudulent bills, forged acceptances, loans at ruinous interest, money borrowed from confiding relatives with lies—it is all as ill gotten as it is ill applied.

The terror of gambling is the hopelessness of its cure when the passion is once established. It makes the heart as hard as the nether millstone, and renders the man perfectly indifferent to everything but his stake. The gambler will dice with the devil on the banks of perdition until he falls into it forever. Has history in all its pages a more awful death-bed scene than that of Cardinal Mazarin? The last bulletin had been issued; "the pallid specter with the equal footsteps" was at his door; he had had absolution, tears, blessings, extreme unction; what was he doing? Not waiting in solemn or prayerful awe the moment of his release. Not even like the pagan Hadrian murmuring, Animula vagula blandula! He was sitting up in bed playing cards with the court ladies in their frizzed hair and low dresses; holding the cards against death, till death won, and they fell from his clayey hands. Death's approach softens most men; even the old drunkard Falstaff "babbled of green fields" and his innocent youth in his presence; but the gambler thinks only of his trumps and his dice until he drops into the grave.

The fact that so many young men are thronging all places where they can live by perilous "chances" is a matter assuming a grave aspect, both in a moral and economical sense, and constitutes a social problem of deep and far-reaching significance. Individually, it seems hopeless to contend with it; and yet it has been by individual efforts that all great moral triumphs have been won. Here a convert and there a convert, and the Christian Church was formed. Seven men, only, started the "teetotal" crusade; a still less number the anti-slavery movement. We must never forget that individual effort is as powerful for good as for evil. Every good man can frown upon a bet, or a gambling transaction of any amount or any kind, as something wicked and disreputable. He can refuse to touch a "book" or dabble in a "pool," or even make a "corner." He can be satisfied with honest gains, and never take enormous chances to make stupendously wicked failures. He can frown upon all trading whose element is dishonest, whatever the profits may be; for all such gain is sin; and without controversy the end of sin is death.