Produced by Bryan Ness, Hunter Monroe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) [Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER.] Gamblers and Gambling By Rev. Henry Ward Beecher Philadelphia Henry Altemus Copyrighted, 1896, by HENRY ALTEMUS. HENRY ALTEMUS, MANUFACTURER, PHILADELPHIA. GAMBLERS AND GAMBLING Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments and made four parts, to every soldier a part, and also his coat. Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots far it, whose it shall be. These things therefore the soldiers did. I have condensed into one account the separate parts of this gambling transaction as narrated by each evangelist. How marked in every age is a Gambler's character! The enraged priesthood of ferocious sects taunted Christ's dying agonies; the bewildered multitude, accustomed to cruelty, could shout; but no earthly creature, but a Gambler, could be so lost to _all_ feeling as to sit down coolly under a dying man to wrangle for his garments, and arbitrate their avaricious differences by casting dice for his tunic, with hands spotted with his spattered blood, warm and yet undried upon them. The descendants of these patriarchs of gambling, however, have taught us that there is nothing possible to hell, uncongenial to these, its elect saints. In this lecture it is my disagreeable task to lead your steps down the dark path to their cruel haunts, there to exhibit their infernal passions, their awful ruin, and their ghastly memorials. In this house of darkness, amid fierce faces gleaming with the fire of fiercer hearts, amid oaths and groans and fiendish orgies, ending in murders and strewn with sweltering corpses,--do not mistake, and suppose yourself in Hell,--you are only in its precincts and vestibule. * * * * *