I shall call upon you to consider the drunkenness, the stock-gambling,
the rampant dishonesties, the club-houses so far as they are
nefarious, the excess of fashion, the horrors of unchastity, the
bad books and unclean newspapers, and the whole range of sinful
amusements; and with the plough-share of truth turn up the whole
field.

If we could call up the victims themselves, they would give the most
impressive story. People knew not how Turner, the painter, got such
vivid conceptions of a storm at sea, until they heard the story that
oftentimes he had been lashed to the deck in the midst of the tempest,
in order that he might study the wrath of the sea.

Those who have themselves been tossed on the wave of infamous
transgressions could give us the most vivid picture of what it is
to sin and to die. With hand tremulous with exhausting disease, and
hardly able to get the accursed bowl to his lips--put into such a hand
the pencil, and it can sketch, as can no one else, the darkness, the
fire, the wild terror, the headlong pitch, and the hell of those who
have surrendered themselves to iniquity. While we dare only come near
the edge, and, balancing ourselves a while, look off, and our head
swims, and our breath catches,--those can tell the story best who have
fallen to the depths with wilder dash than glacier from the top of a
Swiss cliff, and stand, in their agony, looking up for a relief
that comes not, and straining their eyes for a hope that never
dawns--crying, "O God!" "O God!"

It is terrible to see a lion dashing for escape against the sides of
his cage; but a more awful thing it is to behold a man, caged in bad
habit, trying to break out,--blood on the soul, blood on the cage.