How well the good man succeeded in obliterating games of chance or hazard may be questioned, since Nuremburg is still one of the chief centres of card making, the descendants of the original makers being in active business to-day, who sell sheets of cardboard that were concealed for many years, on which the cards are printed, but not cut apart, for probably the manufacture was checked at the time, but never entirely suppressed. The celebrated museum of the town has one of the best collections of native Playing Cards to be found, while the dramatic holocaust is recalled with pride by the inhabitants, who value the woodcut that is commemorative of the event. English preachers denounced card playing, and the Scotch dubbed the packs "The Devil's Picture Books." Robert Burns says: The Ladies, arm in arm, in clusters, As great and gracious a' as sisters, * * * * * On lee-lang nights, wi' crabbit leuks. Pore owre the devil's pictured beuks. The Sunday before Christmas, 1529, Bishop Latimer preached a sermon against gambling at St. Edward's Church, in Cambridge, taking for his text "Who art thou?" and filling his sermon with phrases that were culled from Primero, which was the favourite game of his day. This knowledge showed such an intimate acquaintance with the game that his offended hearers used it with great effect against him. The sermon is now remembered only because of these phrases and expressions that give students a clue to the rules and play of the old game. One ingenious preacher took for his text: "As God has dealt to every man" (Romans xii:3), implying that the Almighty had sorted and distributed the cards of life. This practical allusion to gambling so horrified his congregation that they nearly pulled the minister from the pulpit. Yet St. Paul evidently referred to the "tablets of fate," on which the destinies of men were written at birth as "the measure of fate," since these traditions must have been active in the mind of the apostle. Modern people seldom place themselves in the atmosphere of Biblical times, which leads to much misconstruction and misunderstanding. The various proclamations and edicts passed against Playing Cards are a history in themselves, although it is a pity that they are of too late a date to throw much light on the first alteration of the cult of Mercury into games, a change that was probably gradual, and so insidious or secret as to have no public record. Still, it is through these legal papers that we get authentic dates and the earliest mention of cards as gambling instruments or toys; but at the end of the fourteenth century, at a time when cards were denounced as such, and by name there is still no interdiction of fortune-telling, which may have been conducted too secretly to occasion attention, or, perhaps, the general law against vagrants or gypsies may have been deemed sufficient protection.