What it Costs | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 21, 1864

What it Costs.

A SINGLE gambling house in London cost $50,000, and its receipts were enormous. The money lost in London alone, by various modes of gambling, annually amounts to thirty-five millions. At Crockford's, a noted resort for gamblers, five millions were lost and won in one night. An English nobleman gives fifteen hundred dollars for a box at the opera. An Italian singer receives an annual salary of seventy thousand dollars. This would sustain forty-six married missionaries among the heathen. In one year London wasted on one of its twenty-two theaters sufficient to supply one hundred evangelists to the world. Great Britain expends annually on tobacco and ardent spirits about one hundred and twenty-five millions, enough to sustain sixty thousand mission families for a ruined world. In war what enormous sums are expended. Four of the prime powers of Europe maintain two millions in arms, at an annual expenditure of hundreds of millions. There is no end to what the world expends to gratify the evil passions of our nature, while to spread the Gospel and shed over earth the blessings of life how scanty is the measure!

And yet the gospel is triumphing over the world and the temporal millennium is just upon us! At least so says the peace and safety cry, and so a popular theory compels men to claim whether they believe it or not.