Connecticut western news., 1890-08-06
THE WATERING PLACES.
SUBJECT OF DR. TALMAGE'S SERMON
 ON SUNDAY.

SUBJECT OF DR. TALMAGE's SERMON ON SUNDAY.
 He Declares That They Are Full of the Most Destructive Influences. and Warns All Men and Women to Beware of the Shares of Vacation Time.
 BROOKLYN, Aug. 3. ~ Come ye | yourselves apart into 8 desert place, and rest awhile.-Mark vi, 31.
 Here Christ advises his apostles to take a vacation. They have been iv- 1 ing an excited as well as a useful life, and he advises that they get out into the country. am glad that for longer or shorter time multitudes of our peo pie will have summer vacation. The railway trains are being laden with pas sengers and baggage on their way to the mountains and the seashore. Null titudes of our citizens are packing their trunks for restorative absence.
 THE HEAT OF THE CITY.
 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 I 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 lead CT taps the music stand on the hotel green and American life puts on festal array, and the rumbling of the tenpin alley, and the crack of the ivory balls on the green baize billiard tables, and the jolting of the bar room goblets, and | the explosive uncorking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustic of l the ball room dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race courses attest that the l season for the great American water ing places is fairly inaugurated. Music flute and drum and cornet-a-piston and clapping cymbals-will wake the | echoes of the mountains
 Glad l am that Jagged out American life, for the most part, will have an op- portunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed will find Bethesda I believe in watering places. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient the physician, or the church it's pastor, 8 season of inocoupation. Luther used to sport with his children; Ed mund Burke used to caress his favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hours of the church's disruption, played kite for recreation-as I was told by his own daughter-and the busy Christ said to the busy apostles, "Come ye yourselves apart into desert place, and rest awhile." And have observed that they who do not know how to rest do not know how to work.
 TEMPORAL AND ETERNAL DESTRUCTION. But have to declare this truth to- l day, that some of our fashionable watering places are the temporal and eternal destruction of Ia multitude that no man can number" and amid the congratulations of this season and the prospect of the departure of many of you for the country must utter a note of warning earnest and un- mistakable
 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 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 suffocated, lying stretched on the rug stark dead. There is no surplus of piety at the watering places. I never knew any one to grow very rapidly in grace at the fashiona- ble summer resort. It is generally the case that the Sabbath is more of a 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 consistent at home, sometimes 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 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 ex-
 cite admiration; and in 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 feat
 ures. Four puny souls stand in the or gan loft and squall tune that nobody
 knows, and worshipers with two thou sand dollars worth of diamonds on the right hand drop cent into the poor
 box, and then the benediction is pro-
 nounced and the farce is ended.
 THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL.
 The air is bewitched with ''the world,
 the flesh and the devil" There are
 Christians who in three or four weeks
 in such place have had such terrible
 rents made in their Christian robe that
 they had to keep alarming it until Christ
 mas to get it mended! The health of 8
 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 sur.
 rounded by guffaw and saturnalia
 Keep holy the Sabbath though they
 denounce you as bigoted Puritan