The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1890-08-15
A TIMELY TOPIC.
DR.. Talmage on the Follies of
Summer Resorts.
Evils Surrounding the Fashionable Water
ing Piaces-Piety Too Often Left ut
Home BY the visitors-Frivol-
tiles and Follies Exposed.

In late sermon at Brooklyn Rev. T.
Dewitt Talmage discoursed upon the
use and abuse of summer resorts. His
text was Mark 9, 81: "Come We your.
selves apart into desert place and rest
awhile" He said:
Here Christ advises His apostles tc
take vacation. They have been living
an excited as well as useful life, and
he advises that they get out into the
country. am glad that for longer OF
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 the
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
| nepiseogee is shattered with the stroke
of steamer laden with excursionists.
The antler 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 rum bling of the ten-pin alley,
and the crack of the ivory balls on the
green baized billiard tables, and the
jolting of the barroom goblets, and the
explosive uncorking Of champagne bot
ties and 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 water
ing places is fairly inaugurated.
Glad L am that tagged out American
life for the most part will have an op-
portunity to rest, and that nerves racked
and destroyed will find Bethesda. 1
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 its
pastor, season of inoccupation. The
busy Christ said to the busy apostles:
Come ye 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
ing places are the temporal and eternal
destruction of "a multitude that no man
can number" and amid the congratula-
lions of this season and the prospect of
the departure of many of you for the
country must utter note of warming
plain, earnest and unmistakle.
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 temp
tation will be to leave your religion in
the room with 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 in 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.
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 church, it is apt
to be sacred parade, and the discourse,
instead of being plain talk about the
soul, is apt to be what is called crack
sermon-that is, some discourse that is
picked out of the illusions Of the year
as the one most adapted to excite ad-
mira ton; and in those churches, from
the way the ladies hold their fans, you
know they are not half so much i'm
pressed with the heat as with the pictur-
sequences Of half disclosed features.
Four puny souls stand in the organ loft
and squall tune that nobody knows, and
worshipers, with two thousand dollars
worth of diamonds on the right hand,
drop a 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 place have had such terrible |
rents made in their Christian robe that |
they had to keep darning 1t until |
Christmas to get it mendedI The health |
Of a great many people makes an annual |
visit to the springs. an absolute neces-
sity; but take your Bible along with |
you, and take an hour for secret prayer |
every day, though you be surrounded by |
guffaw and saturnaliA This may be |
your last summer. If SO make it fit |
vestibule of Heaven. a.
Another temptation around nearly all
our watering places is the horse-racing
business. We all admire the horse. |
There needs to be redistribution of |
among the brute creation For |
ages the lion has been called the king
Of beasts knock off its coronet and
put the crown upon the horse, in every
way nobler, whether in shape or spirit
or sagacity or intelligence or affection
or usefulness.
Job sets forth his strength, his beau
ty, his majesty, the painting OF his nos
trils, the paving of his hoof, and his
for the battle. What Rosa
did for cattle, and what Land
seer did for the dog, Job, with mightier
pencil, does for the horse. Eighty-eight
times does the Bible speak of him. He
comes into every kingly possession, and
into every great occasion and into every
triumph. 1t is very evident that Job
and David and Isaiah and Ezekiel and
Jeremiah and John were very fond of
the horse. He came into much of their
imagery. A red horse-that meant war;
\ black horse-that meant famine; a
pale horse-that meant death; white