The Brookhaven leader., 1890-08-14
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
Watering-Place Life, It's Tempta-
lions and Designations.
The MANY Pitfalls for the Needless and
Unwary of Both Sexes Found where
Health Giving Recreation
f. Sought.


The following discourse on the abuse
of Summer Resorts" in the Brooklyn
Academy of Music. His text was:
Come ye yourselves apart unto a desert
place and rest awhile.-Mark vi, 81.
Here Christ advises His disciples to
take vacation. They have been living
an excited as well as useful life, and
lie advises that they get out into the
country. am glad that for longer or
shorter time multitudes Of our people
will have summer vacation. The rail-
way trains are being laden with passen-
Eers and baggage on their way to the
Mountains and tho seashore. Multi
mdes of our citizens are packing their
trunks for n restorative absence.
The city heats are pursuing the peo-
pie with torch and fear OF sunstroke.
Tho long silent halls of sumptuous
hotels are all abuzz with excited ar.
rivals. The crystalline surface of Win
nipiseogee is shattered with the stroke
Of steamer laden with excursionists.
The antlers of Adirondack deer rattle
under the shot of city sportsmen. The
trout make fatal snaps at the hook OF
idroit sportsmen and toss their spotted
bTilliance into the game basket AL
ready the baton of the orchestral leader
taps the music stand on the hotel
green, and American life puts
on festal array, and the
sumbling of the ten-pin alley, and the
crack of the ivory balls on the green.
baized tables, and the jolting of the
bar-room goblets, and the explosive I'M
corking of champagne bottles, and the
whirl and the rustic of the ballroom
dance, and the Gathering hoofs OF the
race courses, attest that the season for
the great American watering places is
fairly inaugurated. Music-flute and
drum and cornet-a-piston, and clap
ping Gym bals-will wake the echoes of
the mountains.
Glad l am that fagged-out American
life for the most part will have an OBJ
portunity to rest, and that nerves
racked and destroyed will find Be-
thesda. ] believe in watering places.
Let not the commercial firm begrud &c
the clerk, or the employer the journey
man, or the patient the physician, or
tilt ulN4l 1tS bdSCtAs d SIetoOh VI INV
cupation. Luther used to sport with his
children; Edmund Burke used to caress
his favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers,
in the dark hours of the church's dis
ruption, played kite for recreation-as
] was told by his own daughter-and
the busy Christ said to the busy apos-
ties: 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.
But have to declare this truth to-
day, that some of our fashionable water
ing places are the temporal and eternal
destruction of "a multitude that no
man can number" and amid the con
gratulations of this season and the
prospect of the departure of many of
you for the country l must utter note
of warning-plain, earnest and unmis-
taxable.
The first temptation 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 we'll
cared for somewhere else; but the
temptation will be to leave your relig-
ion in the room with the blinds down
and the door bolted, and then you will
como back in the autumn to find
that it is starved and sutfo-
Gated, lying stretched on the rug
stark dead. There. is no surplus
of piety at the watering places l never
knew any one to grow very rapidly in
grace at the fashionable summer resort.
1t is generally the case that the Sab
bath is more of carousal than any
other day, and there are Sunday walks
and Sunday rides and Sunday excur-
sions.
Elders and deacons and ministers OF
religion who are entirely consistent at
home, some times when the Sabbath
dawns on them at Niagara Falls or the
White mountains take the day to them
selves. If they go to the church, it is
apt to be a sacred parade, and the dis
course, 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 illusions of the year
as the one most adapted to excite ad
miration; 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 pict
uresqueness of half-disclosed features
Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft
and squall tune that nobody knows
and worshipers, with two thousand dol
lars worth of diamonds on the right
hand drop cent into tho poOr-box, and
then the benediction is pronounced and
the farce is ended.
The air is bewitched with 1.-The
world, the flesh and the devil" There
are Christians who in three or four
weeks in such a place have had such
terrible rents made in their Christian
robes that they had to keep darning it
until Christmas to get it menGed. The
health of 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 and
saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath,
though they denounce you as a
bigoted Puritan. Stand off from the
institutions which propose to initiate on
this side of the water the iniquities of
olden-time Baden Baden. Let your
moral and your immoral health keep
pace with your physical recuperation,
and remember that all the waters of
Hathorne and sulphur and chaly
springs can not do you so much good as