A CONDITION WITH A MEANING.
By S.
Religious and secular journals have recently been discussing the question of whether a certain new and popular parlor game was a wicked game. One journal declares that it “is rapidly bringing in its train other evils than mere inane waste of time. Gambling has taken it, and innumerable young people are speculating money they can ill afford on the results of the games. Here young women and girls are affected more than young men, for they can speculate with a show of respectability which does not attach to other forms of gambling.” Now there is no game ever played, there is no event in life, but can be made to serve as an instrument of the gambler. The wickedness is not in the game or the event, but in the heart that uses them to waste precious moments, squander money, or win from another that to which we have no just claim or right, and in so doing form for ourselves a worse than useless character. The game can not possibly harm those who do not play it. The wickedness is in the heart of those who make use of the game to a useless or wicked purpose. The different games give different and various opportunities for accomplishing certain results; but they are but sets of rules devised by men. It is a fact that every individual in the world can find something better to do than to play any of them. Around certain games there hangs the very odor of wickedness, because of the wickedness that has been done in connection with their playing, by the ones who did the playing. Such games seem to have been specially devised for the accomplishment of wicked purposes, and he who has a wicked purpose in his heart will find in such games a chance to work it out. He who has learned the rules of these games has with him a continual temptation to employ them as they have come to be employed by wicked men. There are better rules to incorporate into one's life than the rules governing the games of chance. The suddenness with which this new parlor game has become an instrument of the gambler only goes to show the prevalence of the gambling spirit in the world. It shows also to what an alarming extent the gambling mania has permeated the homes of the people; for this new game is a parlor game. It is also noted that it finds its devotees among the girls and young women of the family. There is in this a revelation of the vital dearth of Christian principles in the homes of the land. The heart that is surrendered to Christ can never stoop to take that which is another's by any set of rules or by any kind of game. Vital godliness in the heart could never permit participation in games of chance for money; and a true sense of what the business of Christianity demands of us would never permit us to squander in such a way that which is of so much more value than money—our time. The mania for frivolity and gambling is eating into the lives of the people of this generation like the most virulent cancer. It is a sign of the times, and a most striking one, and with all the other unmistakable signs of these days, is pointing to the one great event, the day of this earth's visitation, when God will put an end to sin, and establish the rule of righteousness. S.