Page:Profit and loss, or, The Christian merchant.pdf/18

 God, he would have soothed the wanderer, and opened a door of hope.

But alas you proceeded to fill up the measure of iniquity; you sought an intimacy with those whose habits of impurity were confirmed; you entered (we shudder to think of it) on the ignominious trade of prostitution! What were your gains? Let the vile procuress, whose frowns and threatenings you so much dread, by whose tricks and violence you have been so much injured; let her reply. What forms of wretchedness have you not beheld and encountered Have you not suffered from more than a brutal cruelty; have you not shivered in the storm; pined in some filthy abode; and, amidst heaps of companions, witnessed infamy not to be told, and shared in wretchedness scarcely to be imagined?

It were well if your history did not supply still more gloomy reflections. But we fear your guilt has kept pace with your misery, or rather outstripped it.

You are now familiar with practices which in happier days would have inspired horror. You can bear to stagger with intemperance; you can pour out the most frightful curses; you can rave like the destroying tempest; you have thrown away the very profession of honesty; you are ripe for all abominations—Such is the picture that has been drawn of your condition and character; would to God that persons of so unhappy a class, could generally speaking, prove it to be overcharged.

Now and then, perhaps, you afford this picture a glance, and when you do, the momentary pang extorts imprecations on the man who enticed you into this path of ruin. You blacken his memory