I have no need to define gambling. Everyone knows that it is one of the means of illicit gain and illicit loss. Indeed, all of you know that it is one of the causes of ruin and destruction: it wrecks homes, brings shame, and in many cases ends with the gambler in madness or suicide.

And perhaps I am not mistaken if I say that it is a chronic, baneful disease that has spread through the circles of society at all their varying levels, so that a cure for it has become difficult, if not practically impossible.

And although people grasp its dan-gers and are scorched by its fire, their eagerness for it grows day by day — a thing which has driven governments and the responsible religious authorities to forbid it, or to confine its harms and keep watch over those who ply it.

What compels astonishment is that people take up gambling of their own free choice, knowing what calamities and disasters follow from this act of theirs, and what misery and wretchedness befall them and their kin because of it. Perhaps the reason is that gambling is easy of entrance and light of grasp: in it are abundant elements of temptation and allurement, and in it are many promptings of hope and of hazard.

Weak, idle souls incline to it as well — souls that turn coward in the fields of hard work and fall back before duties.

A class of the rich practices gaming as one of the means of amusement, but before long they sink into its mire, and the matter ends with them in the state in which every gambler ends, be he rich or poor, notable or lowly — I mean the state of misery and abasement, the loss of dignity and health and the rest, which makes a man a despised, feeble member from whom no good is to be hoped.

And therefore I can affirm that the sensible man who guards his reputation and his dignity, his health, his money, and his family holds himself above stooping to the practice of gaming, which is an abomination of Satan's work.

For the gambler's presence in an atmosphere saturated with corruption, among persons who are strangers to him and among ravening wolves that long to tear him to pieces, breeds in him a hatred of himself and of his surroundings, until he sees nothing around him but enemies — until even his wife's smile appears to him as mockery of his loss, and the chirping of his children as though

they strove to increase his misery, and the kindness of his friends as a means of gaining their own ends in the hour of his wretchedness. The causes of this distressing state of mind are many; the chief of them:

1 — The decline of the gambler's health: staying up whole long nights, and bending constantly under a feeble light among people of whose health God alone knows the measure, affects the gambler's digestive system and leaves it unable to resist disease; and so his health declines.

2 — The weakening of the gambler's mental apparatus: the factor of sudden

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