hours, and to all the habits and evils of sluggishness, ignorance and drunkenness. It is a thing bad in its very nature; reason tells us that its direct tendency is to misery and infamy; and daily and hourly experience most amply confirm her dictates. Unhappily she, in too many cases, gives us her warnings in vain, while the annals of the jail and the gibbet blazon forth the triumphs of gaming.

The winning gamester's thoughts and feelings are but those of a successful, an undetected and unpunished thief. The loser, the ruined, is absolutely without consolation. Losses arising from other causes are accompanied with some mitigation. If caused by the oppression or injustice of others; even if proceeding from our own negli gence or folly; we have, at least, the compassion of our friends, and can endure the comments of our minds. But, the ruined gamester has no resource, either from without or within. Contempt is all he can expect from the mass of mankind; and, how is he to endure existence, when, amidst

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the scoffs of the world, he looks back on fortune

:

lost by the throw of a die, and lost, too, in the base endeavour to purloin the fortune of another! Disconsolate father! Distracted mother! You, who are sinking into the earth over the corpse of a self-murdered gaming son! There you behold the result of your own misconduct. It was you who created the fatal taste; it was you who taught his little hands to shuffle and to trick: it was you who taught his infant looks to lie it was you who implanted in his heart the love of enchanting fraud! Take, then, your just reward: sorrow, remorse and shame, and constant fear for the remainder of your days, to hear even an allusion to him, who, but for your fault, might have been the comfort and pride of your lives, and have borne your name with honour to posterity!

GOD'S VENGEANCE

AGAINST PUBLIC ROBBERS.

"But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of "them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison-houses: "they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith Restore:"

ISAIAH, Chap. 42, V.22.

"And behold at evening tide trouble; and before the morning he is not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, and "the lot of them that rob us."

ISAIAH, Chap. 17, V. 14.

A PUBLIC ROBBER, or robber of the public, is one who robs the people of a country, community, or nation. We hear and read sermons enough on the wickedness of stealing from and robbing individuals.

The crimes of stealing privately in houses; of breaking open dwellings to rob; of robbery committed on the highway; of frauds committed on traders and others of making false writings for the purposes of fraud; of embezzlement of the goods or money of employers; of marauding in gardens and fields; and even of taking to our own use, in certain cases, wild animals, that have no owner, or proprietor, at all: the sin of committing these crimes is frequently, though not too frequently, laid before us in colours the most odious, though not more odious than the nature and tendency of it call for.

Those who reprobate acts of this description do right; but, if, at the same time, they carefully abstain from all exposure of the nature of public robbery; if they pass that over in silence, and especially if they, by any means, either direct or indirect, give their sanction to, frame an excuse for, palliate in any degree, the deeds of the public robber: if such be their conduct, they do wrong; they are the enemies of mankind; they are the foes of justice, morality and religion; and to them applies the question of the prophet JEREMIAH (Chap. 7, V. 11.) "Is this house, which is called by my name,