A WORD BEFORE WE PART.
You have now perused this Revelation of the Church
and Home. It is to the Home, that we turn for consolation
and repose, when our feet are weary, and our
hearts are suffering. For the Home is the holiest altar
which God has reared upon the face of the earth. Better
that all the Churches in the world were levelled to
the dust, than that the peace of one Home should be
destroyed.
But there are two persons who continually threaten
the peace and too often destroy the sanctity of Home.
The False Preacher and the False Physician.
Entrusted with the confidence of every member of
the Home, these men, every day abuse that confidence,
and reward a blind faith, with treachery and outrage.
Certain victims of the treachery of the False
Preacher and the False Physician, delineated in the
preceding pages, after many trials, survive this treachery
and foil these traitors.
But what says the experience of every-day life?
Who shall count the families that have been sundered,
the children that have been cast, helpless and
stigmatized, upon the mercy of the world, the husbands
and wives that have been torn from each other, the
Homes that have been transformed into Hells, through
the influence of these Criminals of Society — The
False Preacher and the False Physician?
In these pages you have seen one member of each
class of criminals, delineated with the sincerity and the
power, that always attends an earnestly spoken Truth.
The previous work lacking the unity and compactness
of a mere Novel, has claims to be considered as a History
of Real Life.
But there are other False Preachers, there are other
False Physicians, whose crimes upon society and the
home — crimes striking at the very heart of woman's
purity and man's honor — demand a volume much
larger than the present, a pen much more powerful
than mine.
In another, and a larger work than this, the task will
be attempted.
The reader who has traced the characters of Reuben
Gatherwood and Edmund Jervis — these Iscariots who
betray the Home, as Judas sold his God — will find
other members of the same family delineated in the
pages of a larger work, more extended in its plan, more
exciting in its incidents, more comprehensive in its plot
than the “Memoirs,” and entitled “THE EMPIRE
CITY, OR NEW YORK BY NIGHT AND DAY.”
