St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1885-07-11
TAKE A VACATION.
Exhaustive Labor Calls for Sea-
sons of Rest.
DIR, TaImage on the Temptations Which
Beset One in the Hours of Relaxa-
ton : Notes of Warning
The Living Fountain.

subject OF recent SERMON Dy It6H' 1. 10
Witt Talmage, delivered at the Broyklyn
Tabernacle. The text was from Mark vi,
81: "Come ye yourselves apart into a
desert place, and rest awhile" DR.. Tai
mage said:
Here Christ advises His apostles to take
a vacation They had been living an ex-
cited as we'll as useful life, and He advises
that they get out into the country. When
six weeks ago standing in this place | ad-
vocated, with all the energy could com
mapd, the Saturday afternoon holiday, l
did not think the people would so soon get
that release. By divine fat it has come,
and rejoice that more people will have
opportunity of recreation this summer
than in any previous summer. Others will
have whole weeks and months of rest. The
railroad trains are being laden with pas
sengers and baggage on their way to the
mountains and the lakes and the sea-
shore. Multitudes of our citizens are pack
ing their trunks for restorative absence.
Let not the commercial firm begrudge
the clerk, or the employer the journeyman,
or the patient the physician, or the church
its pastor season of inoccupation. Luther
used to sport with his children; Edmund
Burke used to caress his favoriUe horse;
Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hour Of the
Church's disruption, played kite for
recreation-so / was told by his own
daughter-and the busy Christ said to the
busy Apostles: ''Come we apart awhile
into the desert and rest yourselves" And
/ have observed that they who do not
know how to rest do not know how to
work.
NOTE OF WARNING.
But have to declare this truth to-day
that some of our fashionable watering
places are the temporal and eternal de-
structon of "a multitude that no man can
NUMBER" and amid the congratulations of
this season and the prospect of the depart
ure of many of you for the country
must utter note of warning, plain, ear
nest and unmistakable. The first tempta-
ton that is apt to hover in this direction
is to leave your piety all at home. You
will send the dog and cat and canary bird
to be cared for somewhere else; but the
temptation will be to leave your religion
in the room with the blinds down and the
door bolted, and then you will come back
in the autumn to find that it is starved and
suffocated, lying stretched on the rug,
stark dead. There is no surplus of piety at
the watering places 1 never knew any
one to grow very rapid in grace at the
CatskilI Mountain House or Sharon
Springs or the Halls of Montmorency. 1t
is generally the case that the Sabbath is
more of carousal than any other day,
and there are Sunday walks and Sunday
rides and Sunday excursions. Elders and
deacons and ministers of religion, who are
entirely contented at home, sometimes
when the Sabbath dawns on them at Mag
ara Falls or the White Mountains take
their day to themselves. If they go to
the church it is apt to be sacred
parade, and the discourse, instead Of being
a plain talk about the soul, is apt to
be what is called crack sermon-that is,
some discourse picked out of the effusions
of the year as the one most adapted to
excite admiration; and in those churches,
from the way the ladies hold their fans
you know that they are not so much i'm
pressed with the heat as with the pictur-
esqueness of half-disclosed features. Four
puny souls stand in the organ loft and
squall a tune that nobody knows, and wor-
shippers with $1,000 worth of diamonds on
the right hand drop cent into the poor
box, and then the benediction is pronounced
and the farce is ended. The toughest thing
/ ever tried to do was to be good at a
watering place.
Tho health of great many people makes
an annual visit to some mineral spring an
absolute necessity; but, my dear people,
take your Bible along with you, and take
an hour for secret prayer every day,
though you be surrounded by guffaw and
saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though
they denounce you as bigoted Puritan.
Stand off from those institutions which
propose to initiate on this side the water
the iniquities of Baden Baden. Let your
moral and immortal health keep pace with
your physical recuperation, and remember
that all the waters of Hawthorne and sui
you so much good as the mineral, healing,
perennial food that breaks forth from the
Crock of Ages" This may be your last
summer. If so, make it fit vestibule Of
Heaven.
THE HORSE AND HORSE RACING.
Another temptation around nearly all
our watering places is the horse-racing
business. We all admire the horse. There
needs to be a redistribution of coronets
among the brute creation. For ages the
lion has been called the king of beasts. /
knock off its coronet and put the crown
upon the horse, in every way nobler,
whether in shape or spirit or sagacity or
intelligence or affection or usefulness.
AS the Bible makes favorite of the
horse, the patriarch and the prophet and
the evangelist and apostle stroking his
sleek hide and patting his rounded neck,
and tenderly lifting his exquisitely formed
hoof and listening with thrill to the