Gambling Addiction

Gambling is founded upon the very worst perversion of this powerful element of our nature. It heats every part of the mind like an oven. The faculties which produce calculation, pride of skill, of superiority, love of gain, hope, fear, jealousy, hatred, are absorbed in the game, and exhilarated, or exacerbated by victory or defeat.

These passions are, doubtless, excited in men by the daily occurrences of life; but then they are transient, and counteracted by a thousand grades of emotion, which rise and fall like the undulations of the sea. But in gambling there is no intermission, no counteraction. The whole mind is excited to the utmost, and concentrated at its extreme point of excitation for hours and days, with the additional waste of sleepless nights, profuse drinking, and other congenial immoralities.

Every other pursuit becomes tasteless; for no ordinary duty has in it a stimulus which can scorch a mind which now refuses to burn without blazing, or to feel an interest which is not intoxication. The victim of excitement is like a mariner who ventures into the edge of a whirlpool for a motion more exhilarating than plain sailing.

He is unalarmed during the first few gyrations, for escape is easy. But each turn sweeps him further in; the power augments, the speed becomes terrific as he rushes toward the vortex; all escape now hopeless. A noble ship went in; it is spit out in broken fragments, splintered spars, crushed masts, and cast up for many a rood along the shore.

The specific evils of gambling may now be almost imagined.