"Go ahead, and we will back you with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

I must adjourn until next Sabbath morning much of what I wanted to say about certain forms of iniquity which I saw rampant in the night of my exploration with the city officials. But before I stop this morning I want to have one word with a class of men with whom people have so little patience that they never get a kind word of invitation. I mean the men who have forsaken their homes. Oh! my brother, return. You say: "I can't; I have no home; my home is broken up." Reestablish your home. It has been done in other cases, why may it not be done in your case? "Oh," you say, "we parted for life; we have divided our property; we have divided our effects." I ask you, did you divide the marriage ring of that bright day when you started life together? Did you divide your family Bible? If so, where did you divide it? Across the Old Testament, where the Ten Commandments denounce your sin, or across the New Testament, where Christ says: "Blessed are the pure in heart?" Or did you divide it between the Old and the New Testaments, right across the family record of weddings and births and deaths? Did you divide the cradle in which you rocked your first born? Did you divide the little grave in the cemetery, over which you stood with linked arms, looking down in awful bereavement? Above all, I ask you, did you divide hope for heaven, so that there is no full hope left for either of you? Go back! There may be a great gulf between you and once happy domesticity; but Christ will bridge that gulf. It may be a bridge of sighs. Turn toward it. Put your foot on the over-arching span. Hear it! It is a voice unrolling from the throne: "He that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be

your

unto him a God, and he shall be my son; but the unbelieving, and the sorcerers, and the whoremongers, and the adulterers, and the idolators, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brim. stone--which is the second death!"

CHAPTER III.

THE GATES OF HELL.

"The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."-St. Matthew xvi: 18. "It is only 10 o'clock," said the officer of the law, as we got into the carriage for the midnight exploration— "it is only 10 o'clock, and it is too early to see the places that we wish to see, for the theaters have not yet let out." I said, "What do you mean by that?" "Well," he said, "the places of iniquity are not in full blast until the people have time to arrive from the theaters." So we loitered on, and the officer told the driver to stop on a street where is one of the costliest and most brilliant gambling-houses in the city of New York. As we came up in front all seemed dark. The blinds were down; the door was guarded; but after a whispering of the officer with the guard at the door, we were admitted into the hall, and thence into the parlors, around one table finding eight or ten men in mid-life, well-dressed--all the work going on in silence, save the noise of the rattling "chips" on the gaming-table in one parlor, and the revolving ball of the roulette table in the other parlor. Some of these men, we were told, had served terms in prison; some were ship-wrecked bankers and brokers. and money-dealers, and some were going their first rounds of vice--but all intent upon the table, as large or small fortunes moved up and down before them. Oh! there was something awfully solemn in the silence--the intense gaze, the suppressed emotion of the players. No

one looked up. They all had money in the rapids, and I have no doubt some saw, as they sat there, horses and carriages, and houses and lands, and home and family rushing down into the vortex. A man's life would not have been worth a farthing in that presence had he not been accompanied by the police, if he had been supposed to be on a Christian errand of observation. Some of these men went by private key, some went in by careful introduction, some were taken in by the patrons of the establishment. The officer of the law told me: "None get in here except by police mandate, or by some letter of a patron." While we were there a young man came in, put his money down on the roulette-table, and lost; put more money down on the roulette-table, and lost; put more money down on the roulette-table, and lost; then feeling in his pockets for more money, finding none, in severe silence he turned his back upon the scene and passed out. All the literature about the costly magnificence of such places is untrue. Men kept their hats on and smoked, and there was nothing in the upholstery or the furniture to forbid. While we stood there men lost their property and lost their souls. Oh! merciless place. Not once in all the history of that gaming-house has there been one word of sympathy uttered for the losers at the game. Sir Horace Walpole said that a man dropped dead in front of one of the club-houses of London; his body was carried into the club-house, and the members of the club began immediately to bet as to whether he were dead or alive, and when it was proposed to test the matter by bleeding him, it was only hindered by the suggestion that it would be unfair to some of the players! In these gaming-houses of our cities, men have their property wrung away from them, and then they go out, some of them to drown their grief in strong

drink, some to ply the counterfeiter's pen, and so restore their fortunes, some resort to the suicide's revolver, but all going down, and that work proceeds day by day, and night by night, until it is estimated that every day in Christendom eighty million dollars pass from hand to hand through gambling practices, and every year in Christendom one hundred and twenty-three billion, one hundred million dollars change hands in that way.

"But," I said, "it is 11 o'clock, and we must be off." We passed out into the hallway and so into the street, the burly guard slamming the door of the house after us, and we got into the carriage and rolled on toward the gates of hell. You know about the gates of heaven. You have often heard them preached about. There are three to each point of the compass. On the north, three gates; on the south, three gates; on the east, three gates; on the west, three gates; and each gate is of solid pearl. Oh! gate of heaven; may we all get into it. But who shall describe the gates of hell spoken of in my text? These gates are burnished until they sparkle and glisten in the gas-light. They are mighty, and set in sockets of deep and dreadful masonry. They are high, so that those who are in may not clamber over and get out. They are heavy, but they swing easily in to let those go in who are to be destroyed. Well, my friends, it is always safe to go where God tells you to go, and God had told me to go through these gates of hell, and explore and report, and, taking three of the high police authorities and two of the elders of my church, I went in, and I am here this morning to sketch the gates of hell. I remember, when the Franco-German war was going on, that I stood one day in Paris looking at the gates of the Tuilleries, and I was so absorbed in the sculpturing at the top of the gates--the masonry and the