The inhabitants of one of the old cities were told
that they would have to fly for their lives.
Such flight would be painful, even in the flush of
spring-time, but superlatively aggravating if in cold
weather; and therefore they were told to pray that
their flight be not in the winter.
There is something in the winter season that not only
tests our physical endurance, but, especially in the
city, tries our moral character. It is the winter
months that ruin, morally, and forever, many of our
young men. We sit in the house on a winter’s
night, and hear the storm raging on the outside, and
imagine the helpless crafts driven on the coast; but
if our ears were only good enough, we could, on any
winter night, hear the crash of a hundred moral shipwrecks.
Many who came last September to town, by the first
of March will have been blasted. It only takes
one winter to ruin a young man. When the long
winter evenings have come, many of our young men will
improve them in forming a more intimate acquaintance
with books, contracting higher social friendships,
and strengthening and ennobling their characters.
But not so with all. I will show you before I
get through that, at this season of the year, temptations
are especially rampant: and my counsel is, Look
out how you spend your winter nights!
I remark, first, that there is no season of the year
in which vicious allurements are so active.
In warm weather, places of dissipation win their tamest
triumphs. People do not feel like going, in the
hot nights of summer, among the blazing gas-lights,
or breathing the fetid air of assemblages. The
receipts of the grog-shops in a December night are
three times what they are in any night in July or
August. I doubt not there are larger audiences
in the casinos in winter than in the summer weather.
Iniquity plies a more profitable trade. December,
January, and February are harvest-months for the devil.
The play-bills of the low entertainments then are
more charming, the acting is more exquisite, the enthusiasm
of the spectators more bewitching. Many a young
man who makes out to keep right the rest of the year,
capsizes now. When he came to town in the autumn,
his eye was bright, his cheek rosy, his step elastic;
but, before spring, as you pass him you will say to
your friend, “What is the matter with that young
man?” The fact is that one winter of dissipation
has done the work of ruin.
This is the season for parties; and, if they are of
the right kind, our social nature is improved, and
our spirits cheered up. But many of them are
not of the right kind; and our young people, night
after night, are kept in the whirl of unhealthy excitement
until their strength fails, and their spirits are
broken down, and their taste for ordinary life corrupted;
and, by the time the spring weather comes, they are
in the doctor’s hands, or sleeping in the cemetery.
The certificate of their death is made out, and the
physician, out of regard for the family, calls the
disease by some Latin name, when the truth is that
they died of too many parties.
