The Russellville Democrat., 1890-08-14
SUMMER RESORTS.
Their Abuse Portrayed in a Ser-
 mon by Dr. Talmage.
The Search for Health and Hnnocent Re creation ATet on All sides by Tempta- lions Appealing to the Grosser
 side of Human Nature.


 Side of Human Nature.
 Tho following discourse was deliv- cred by Rev. T. Dewitt Talmage in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, from the text:
 Come ye yourselves apart unto a desert place and rest awhiie.-Mark yi sl.
 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. l 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- gers and baggage on their way to tho mountains and the seashore. Multi tudes of our citizens are packing their trunks for restorative absence.
 The city heats are pursuing the peo- pie with torch and fear of sunstroke. The 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 adroit sportsmen and toss their spotted brilliance 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 rumbling 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 explosiv ve un- corking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustic of the ballroom lance, and the clattering hoofs of the race courses, attest that the season for the great American watering places is fairly inaugurated. Music-fute and drum and cornet-a-piston, and clap. ping cymbals-win wake the echoes of the mountains.
 Glad I am that fagged-out American life for the most part will have an op- portunity to rest, and that nerves raeked and destroyed will find Be thesda. I believe in watering places. Let not the commercial firm begrud ge the clerk, or the employer the journey man, or the patient the physician, or the church it's paster, a season of inoc- 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 l was told by his own daughter-and the busy Christ said to the busy apos- ties: Come ye apart awhile into the desert and rest yourselves" And l 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 mum ber," and amid the con gratulations of this season and the prospect of the departure of many of you for the country must utter note of warning plain, earnest and unmis- takable.
 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 come back in the autumn to find that it is starved and suffo- cated. lying stretched on the rug stark dead. There is no surplus of piety at the watering places never knew any one to grow very rapidly in grace at the fashionable summer resort. It 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 daNns 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 effusions 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 inn pressed with the heat as with the pict- uresqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dol lars 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 air is bewitched with 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 1t 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 gufaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand of 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 chalybeate springs can not do you so much good as the mineral, healing, perennial flood that breaks from the Rock of Ages. 1" This may be your last summer. If so, make it fit vestibule of Heaven.
 Another temptation around nearly all our watering places is the horse racing business We all admire the horse. There needs to be redistribu- tion of coronets among the brute crea- tion. For ages the lion has been called the king of beasts. knock of it's cor onet and put the crown upon the horse, in every way nobler, whether in shape