The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1890-08-04
DANGER AT THE RESORTS.
TALMAGE breaches ON TIE
WATERING PLACES

Some OF Fashions Outing Haunts De-
clared Places of Temporal and Eter-
nal Destruction-Someo of the Temp
tations That Beset the People Who
Frequent Them.
BROOKLYN, Aug. 3.-Dr. Talmage has a
timely topic for his sermon for to-day, in
the use and abuse of summer resorts. His
text is Mark vi, 81: Come ye yourselves
apart unto desert place and rest awhile. y
Following is the sermon:
Here Christ advises his apostles to take a
vacation They have been living an excited
as well as a useful life, and be advises that
they get out into the country. l am glad
that for longer OF shorter time multitudes
of our people will have summer vacation.
The railway trains are being laden with
passengers and baggage on their way to the
mountains and tie seashore. Multitudes of
our citizens IRE packing their trunks for a
restorative absence
The city heats are pursuing the people
with torch and fear of sunsLroke. The long,
silent halls of sumptuous hotels are all
abuzz with excited arrivals. The crystal
line surface of Winnipiseogee is shattered
with the stroke Of steamer, laden with ex-
cursionists. The antlers of Adirondack deer
rattle under the shot of city sportsmen The
trout make fatal snaps at the hook OF adrolt
sportsmen and toss their spotted brllllance
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 rumbllng OF the ten
min alley, and the crack of the ivory balls
on the green baized billiard tables, and the
jolting of the barroom COB cts, and the ex-
plosive unccrking of champagne bottles,
aud the whirl and the rustic of the ball
room dance, and the Gathering hoofs of the
race courses, attest that the season for the
great American watering places is fairly
inaugurated. Music-hute and drum and
coruet-a-plston aud clapping cymbals-wlll
wake the echoes of the mountains.
Glad am that fagged-out American life,
for the most part, will have an opportunity
to rest, and that nerves racked and des-
stroyed will find Bethesda. believe in
watering-places. Let not the commercial
firm begrudge the clerk, or the employer
the journeyman, or the patient the physi
clan, or the church its pastor. season of
inoccupation. Luther used to sport with
his children; Edmund Burke used to careSs
his favortte horses; Thomas Chalmers. in
the dark hours Of the church's disruption,
PLAYED kite for recreation-as was told by
his own daughter-and the busy Christ said
to the busy apostles: Come ye apart
y
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 watering
places are the temporal and eternal destruc-
ton of "a multitude that no mnu can num-
Der, " and amid the congratulations of tins
season and its prospect Of the departure of
many of you for the country | must utter a
note of warning-plaln, 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 well cared for somewhere
else; but the temptation VIII 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 1t is
starved and suffocated, lying stretched on
the rug stark dead. There is no surplus of
piety at the watering-places l never knew
anyone to grow very rapidly in grace at
the fashionable summer resort. 1t is gener-
ally 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 aud deacons and ministers Of re-
iglon. who are entirely consistent at home,
sometimes when the Sabbath dawns on them
at Niagara Falls or the White mountains
the church, it is apt to be a sacred parade,
and the discourse, instead of being a plain
discourse about the soul, is apt to be what
is called crank sermon-that is, some dis
course picked out of the etfusions Of the
year as the one most adapted TO excite ad-
miration; and III those churches, from the
way the ladies hold their fans, you know
that they are not SO much impressed with
the heat as with the pictureSqueness of half
disclosed features. Four pUny souls stand
in the organ loft and squall a tune that no.
body knows, and worshippers, with two
Thousand dollars worth of diamonds on the
right hand, drop cent into the poor-box,
and then the benedlction 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 robe that they had to keep darpinc
it until Christmas to get it mendedl The
health of great many people makes an an
nual visit to some mineral spring an abso-
lutte 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 denouuce you as
bigoted Puritan. Stand off from these
institutions which propose to initiate on
this side the water the iniquities of olden-
time BadenB Baden. Let your moral and
your immortal health keep pace with your
physical recuperation, and remember that
all the waters of Hatnorne and sulphur and
chalybeate springs cannot do you so much
good as the mineral, healing, perennial
food that breaks forth from the Rock of
Ages This may be your last summer
If so, make it fit vestibule Of heaven.
Another temptation around nearly all GU r
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 It's
coronet and put the crown upon the horse,
in every way nobler, whether in shape or
spirit, or sagacity or intelligence, or affec-
rion OF usefulness. He is semi-human, and
knows how to reason on a small scale The
centaur of olden times, part horse and part
man, seems to be suggestion of the fact
that the. horse is something more than a
beast.
Job sets forth his strength, his beauty, his
majesty, the painting of his nostrli. the
paving of his hoof, and bis enthusiasm for
the battle. What Rosa Bonheur did for the
cattle, and what Landseer did for the dog,
Job. with mightier pencil, does for the
horse. lightweight times does the Bible
speak of him. He comes into every kingly
procession, and into every great occasion
and into every triumph. 1t is very evident
that Job and David and Isaiah and Ezekiel
<ud .Taranniah and .TOhn LVara vary fond ~