Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-08-04
Discourse OF Rev. DR.. Talmage in
the City of Brooklyn.
He breaches an Eloquent Sermon Upon
the Uses and Abuses of Summer
Watering Resorts.
An Assertion That They are Responsible Tor
More Domestic Infelicity than all
Things Else Combined.
Special to the Gazette.

" mage HAu u LllIGl1 LOp4S ASt $50
for to-day, in the use and abuse of sum-
mer resorts. His text is Mark W., 81:
4 ''Come ye yourselves apart unto
desert place and rest awhile. - Follow
ing is the sermon:
Here Christ advises his apostles to take
vacation. They have been living an
excited as we'll as useful life, and He
advises that they get out into the coun-
try l am glad that for longer or shorter
time, multltudes of our people will have
summer vacation. The railway trains
are being laden with passengers and
baggage on their way 20 the mountains
and the sea shore. Multitudes of our
citizens are packing their trunks for
restorative absence.
The city heats are pursuing the people
with torch and fear of sunstroke. The
long-silent halls of sum Dtuous hotels are
all abuzz with excited arrivals The
crystalline surface of Winnipiscogee is
shattered with the stroke of steamer,
laden with eXcursionists. The antlers of
Adirondack deer rattle under the shot of
city sportsmen. The trout mako fatal
snaps at the hook of adroit sportsmen
and loss their spotted brilIiance into the
game basket. Already the baton of the
orchestral leader taps the music stand
on the hotel green, and
AMERICAN LIFE PUTS ON FEsTAL ARRAY,
and the rumbliug of the teupln alley aud
the crack of the ivory balls on the green
bRZed billiard tables, and the iolting of
the barroom goblets, and the explosive
uncOrking of champagne bottles, and
the whirl and the rustic of the ballroom
dance, and the Gathering hoots of the
race COursers, attest that the season for
the great American watering places is
fairly inauEurated. Music-fiuts and
drum and cornet-a-p piston and clappng
cymbals-will wake the echoes of the
mountains.
Glad 1 am that fagged-out American
life for the most part will have an OPP
portunity to rest, and that nerves racked
and destroying will find Bethesda. I
believe in watering places. Let not the
commercial firm begrudge the clerk, or
the employer the jourheyman. or the pa
tient the physician, or the church its
pastor, a season of inoccupation.
Luther used TO sport with his children;
Edmund Burke used to caress his favor
lite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in the dark
hours of the church's disruption,
played kite for recreation-as l was told
by his own dnughter-and the busy
Christ said TO the busy apostles:
"Come We apart awhile into the desert
and rest yourselves. And 1 have OBJ
served that they who do not know how to
rest do not know how TO work.
But have to declare this truth to-
day, that some of our fashionable water
iug-places are the temporal and eternal
destruction of ga multitude that no man
tan number " and amid the congratu-
atoms of tins season and the prospect of
the departure of many of you for the
country I must utter note of warning
plain, earnest, and unmistakable.
THE FIRST TEMPTATION
that is apt 10 hover in this direction is to
leave your piety all at home. You will
send the dog and cat and canary bird to
be well cared for somewhere else; but
the temptation Will be TO leave your re-
ligou 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 suffooated, lying stretched
on the rug stark dead. There is no sur
plus of piety ut the watering places. l
never knew anyone to grow very rapidly
in grace at the fashionable summer
resort. 1t is generally the case that the
Sabbath is more of a carousal than any
other day, and there are Sunday walks
aud Sunday rides and Sunday exour-
sions,
Elders aud deacons and ministers of
religion who are entirely consistent at
home, sometimes when the Sabbath
dRwns on them at Niagara Falls or the
White Mountains take the day 10 them
selves. If they 90 to the church, it is
apt TO be sacred parade, and the dis
course, instead of being plain talk
about the soul, is apt TO be what is
called crack sermon-that is, some
discourse picked out of the illusions of
the year as the one most adapted to e&-
cite 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 pic
turesqueness of half-dIsclosed features.
Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft
aud squat q tune that nobody knows,
and worshippers, with $4,000 worth of
diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent
INTO the poor box, and then the bene-
dictlon is pronounced and the farce is
ended.
THE AIR IS BEwITCHED
with "the world, the flesh and the
devil. - There are Christians who in
three OF four weeks in such place have
had such terrible rents made In their
Christian robe that they had to keep
earning II until Christmas to get il
mendedl The health or great many
people makes an annual visit to some
mineral spring an absolute necessity;
but, take your Bible along with you, and
take an hour for secret prayer every day,
though you be surrounded by guffaw
ana snturnRlia. Keep holy the Sabbath,
though they denounce you as q bigoted
Puritan. Stand off from these institu-
tions which propose to initiate on this
side of the water the iniquites of olden-
time Baden Baden. Let your moral aud
your immortal health keep pace with your
physical recupsration, and remember
that all the waters of Hathorne and sui
phur and chalybeAte springs can not do
you so much good as the mineral, heal
ing, perennial food that breaks forth |
from the Rock of Ages" This may
be your last summer. II SO, make it a
fit vestibule of heaven.
Another temptation around nearly ell !
our watering places is the horse racing |
business. We all admire the horse.
There needs to be a redistribution of !
NJ