I. It diseases the mind, unfitting it for the duties of life. Gamblers are seldom industrious men in any useful vocation. A gambling mechanic finds his labor less relishful as his passion for play increases. He grows unsteady, neglects his work, becomes unfaithful to promises; what he performs he slights. Little jobs seem little enough; he desires immense contracts, whose uncertainty has much the excitement of gambling--and for the best of reasons; and in the pursuit of great and sudden profits, by wild schemes, he stumbles over into ruin, leaving all who employed or trusted him in the rubbish of his speculations. A gambling lawyer, neglecting the drudgery of his profession, will court its exciting duties. To explore authorities, compare reasons, digest, and write,--this is tiresome. But to advocate, to engage in fiery contests with keen opponents, this is nearly as good as gambling. Many a ruined client has cursed the law, and cursed a stupid jury, and cursed everybody for his irretrievable loss, except his lawyer, who gambled all night when he should have prepared the case, and came half asleep and debauched into court in the morning to lose a good case mismanaged, and snatched from his gambling hands by the art of sober opponents. A gambling student, if such a thing can be, withdraws from thoughtful authors to the brilliant and spicy; from the pure among these, to the sharp and ribald; from all _reading_ about depraved life, to _seeing_; from sight to experience. Gambling vitiates the imagination, corrupts the tastes, destroys the industry--for no man will drudge for cents, who gambles for dollars by the hundred; or practise a piddling economy, while, with almost equal indifference, he makes or loses five hundred in a night. II. For a like reason, it destroys all domestic habits and affections. Home is a prison to an inveterate gambler; there is no air there that he can breathe. For a moment he may sport with his children, and smile upon his wife; but his heart, its strong passions, are not there. A little branch-rill may flow through the family, but the deep river of his affections flows away from home. On the issue of a game, Tacitus narrates that the ancient Germans would stake their property, their wives, their children, and themselves. What less than this is it, when a man will stake that property which is to give his family bread, and that honor which gives them place and rank in society? When _playing_ becomes desperate _gambling_, the heart is a hearth where all the fires of gentle feelings have smouldered to ashes; and a thorough-paced gamester could rattle dice in a charnel-house, and wrangle for his stakes amid murder and pocket gold dripping with the blood of his own kindred. III. Gambling is the parent and companion of every vice which pollutes the heart, or injures society.