Is It Not a Factor in the Evil?
By Editor
The gambling curse of Chicago—and Chicago is not alone—is appalling. In speaking of that city, and the apathy of the mayor in dealing with the gambling curse, the Advance of the 27th ultimo says:— "Apart from the infamy of it, the wickedness of all this cannot escape attention. The effects of the gambling mania are horrible. Thousands of once happy homes in Chicago are to-day in misery and ruin because of it. The character and prospects of thousands of young men are being blighted by its fatal touch. The gambling habit and the gambling curse stick like the devilfish to their victim. And in the city it is as if the mayor had been the constant and primarily guilty participant day and night in every bunko game that was played, so long as the gambling hells, both the gilded and the squalid, were under perfectly well-understood and paid-for official protection. As easy adorn a sunbeam as exaggerate the perfidy, the essential cruelty, the comprehensive wickedness, the civic shame and criminality of it. None could see this mayor without the instant reminder, there goes the man who—with the whole police force absolutely in his control, and the laws of the State, the county, and city on his side—might any day since he took his oath of office have exterminated all these gambling dens, but who, instead, chose to bargain with them for his official protection." We have no desire whatever to condone or excuse the guilty officials; they may be guilty of all that is charged; but of how much of this evil is the church guilty? "The church guilty?" Yes, the church guilty. Her grab-bags, her fish ponds, her prize guessing, and raffles involve every principle of gambling, are gambling on a small scale. They are schools for the young and inexperienced, whose appetites in such things are whetted for greater risks, and who are led to look upon gambling as not very bad because conducted under the sanction of the church. The church is not the cause of the great curse, but is she not a factor in the matter? The man who despises a drunkard may be the very one who was the chief cause of that drunkard's ruin by urging upon him a single glass of wine or beer. That church which deplores gambling hells may have made the chief gambler, by inducing him to buy tickets to a religious raffle, or a chance in a church fish pond "for sweet charity's sake." How many church members are gambling in stocks? These are matters worthy of consideration on the part of the church. As of old "the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles" through the professed people of God. See Rom. 2: 21-24.