Sin is not only strong to seduce, but heartless to sustain its victims. It will exhaust your means, teach you to despise the God of your fathers, and then when the inevitable disaster of wickedness begins to overwhelm you, it will abandon whom it has debauched.
When at length, death gnaws at your bones, and knocks at your heart, when staggering and worn out, your courage wasted, your hope gone, your purity, and long, long ago your peace— will he who first enticed your steps serve your extremity with one office of kindness? Will he stay your head, cheer your dying agony with one word of hope, or light the way for your coward steps to the grave, or weep when you are gone, or send one pitiful scrap to your desolate family? What reveler wears crape for a dead drunkard? What gang of gamblers ever intermitted a game for the death of a companion? What harlot weeps for a harlot? What debauchee mourns for a debauchee? They would carouse at your funeral, and gamble at your funeral.
If one flush more of pleasure were to be had by it, they would drink shame and ridicule to your memory out of your own skull, and roar in bacchanal revelry over your damnation! Oh! the cruel heartlessness of sin!—BEECHER.
