A GOOD TIME COMING
As on some bitter cold night, while threshing our hands about to keep our thumbs from freezing, we have looked up and seen the northern lights blazing along the sky, the windows of heaven illumined at the news of some …
LIES: WHITE AND BLACK
There are ten thousand ways of telling a lie. A man's entire life may be a falsehood, while with his lips he may not once directly falsify. There are those who state what is positively untrue, but afterwards say, "may …
THE GUN THAT KICKS OVER THE MAN WHO SHOOTS IT OFF
Blasphemy is a crime that aims at God, but does its chief harm to the one that fires it off.
So I compare it to a piece of imperfect firearms to which the marksman puts his eye, and, pulling the trigger, …
THE HOUSE OF BLACKNESS OF DARKNESS
Men like to hear the frailties and faults of others chastised. With what blandness and placidity they sit and hear the religious teacher excoriate the ambition of Ahab, the treachery of Judas, the treason of Athaliah, and the wickedness of …
FLASK, BOTTLE, AND DEMIJOHN
[NOTE.—This chapter, in its first shape, was given some currency under the title of “The Evil Beast.” I have, however, so revised and added to that Lecture, that, as here given, it is essentially a new presentation of the dreadful …
SOME OF THE CLUB-HOUSES
Iniquity never gives a fair fight. It springs out from ambush upon the unsuspecting. Of the tens of thousands who have fallen into bad habits, not one deliberately leaped off, but all were caught in some sly trap. You may …
THE FATAL TEN-STRIKE
While among my readers are those who have passed on into the afternoon of life, and the shadows are lengthening, and the sky crimsons with the glow of the setting sun, a large number of them are in early life, …
LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS
The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one. And there is not an interest—religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical—that is not …
PICTURES IN THE STOCK GALLERY
[NOTE.—This chapter, though largely devoted to "Oil," is to be construed as reaching any other "Kite" that the stock gambler flies—any other scheme which his unprincipled ideas of right and wrong will permit him to work to his own gain …
THE MASSACRE BY NEEDLE AND SEWING-MACHINE
Very long ago the needle was busy. It was considered honorable for women to toil in olden time. Alexander the Great stood in his palace showing garments made by his own mother. The finest tapestries at Bayeux were made by …