There are thousands of boys and youth
who indulge in it. I hear children along the street, but just able to
walk, practising this iniquity. They cannot talk straight, but they
get enough distinctness to let you know that they are damning their
own souls and the souls of others. Oh! it is horrible to see a little
child, the first time it lifts its feet to walk, set them down on
the burning pavement of hell! Between sixteen and twenty years of age
there is apt to come a time when a young man is as much ashamed of
not being able to deliver an oath as he is of the dizziness that comes
from his first cigar. He has his hat and coat and boots of the
right pattern, and there is but one thing more now to bring him into
_fashion_, and that is a capacity to swear.
So there are some of our young men surrounded by an atmosphere of
profanities. Oaths sit on their lips, they roll under their tongues,
and nest in the shock of hair. In elegant drawing-rooms they abstain
from such utterances, but fill club-room and street with their
immoralities of speech.
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