The Yale expositor. (Yale, St. Clair County, Mich.) 1894-current, 1899-09-01
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
"HEALTH RESORTS" THE SUB
JECT LAST SUNDAY.
"a Pool That Il Called IN the Hebrew
Tongue bethesda, Having Five Porch
es, where Lay Great Multitude of
Impotent Folk" John W. z, 3.


shows that there may have been pool |
there three hundred and sixty feet
long, one hundred and thirty feet wide, |
and seventy-five feet deep. This pool |
was surrounded by five piazzas, or
porches, or bathing houses, where the
patients tarried until the time when
they were to step into the water. So
far as refrigeration was concerned, it
must have been Saratoga and Long
Branch on small scale; a Leaning
ton and a Brighton combined-medical
and therapeutic. Tradition says that
at a certain season of the year there
was an officer of the government who
would go down to that water and pour
in it some healing quality, and after
that the people would come and get
the medication; but prefer the plain
statement of Scripture, that at GER
tain season an angel came down and
stirred up or troubled the water; and
then the people came and got the heal
ing. That angel of God that stirred
up the Judean watering place had his
counterpart in the angel of healing,
who, in our day, steps into the mineral
waters of Congress, or Sharon, or Sui
phur Springs, or into the salt sea at
Cape May and Nahant, where multi
tudes who are worn out with CONNER
cial and professional anxieties, as well
as those who are afflicted with rheu-
matte, neuralgia and splenetic diseases,
fhnncon6G
These blessed Bethesdas are scattered
all up and down our country.
We are at a season of the year when
rail trains are laden with passengers
and baggage on their way to the noun
tains and the lakes and the seashore.
Multitudes OF our citizens are away for
a restorative absence. The city heats
are pursuing the people with torch and
fear Of sunstroke. The long, silent
halls of sumptuous hotels are all abuzz
with excited arrivals. The antlers OF
Adirondack deer rattle under the shot
of city sportsmen. The trOat make
fatal snap at the hook of adroit sports
men, who toss their spotted brilliance
into the game basket. The baton of
the orchestral leader taps the music
stand on the hotel green, and Ameri-
can life has put on festal array, and
the rumbling of the ten-pin alley, and
the crack of the ivory balls on the
green-baized billiard tables, and the
jolting of the bar-room goblets, and
the explosive uncorking of the cham
payne bottles, and the whirl and the
rustic of the ballroom dance, and the
Gathering hoofs Of the race courses,
and other signs of social dissipation,
attest that the season for the great
American watering-places is in full
play. Music! Flute, and drum, and
cornet-a-piston, and clapping cymbals
wake the echoes of the mountains.
Glad am l that tagged out American
life, for the most part, has an oppor-
tunity to rest, and that nerves racked
, and destroyed will find Bethesda. ]
believe in watering-places. They re-
cuperate for active service many who
were worn out with trouble or over
, work. They are national restoratives
Let not the commercial firm begrudge
the clerk, or the employer the jour
; neyman, OF the patient the physician
5 or the church its pastor, a season Of
= inoccupation. Luther used to sport
Y with his children; Edmund Burke USED
= TO caress his favorite horse; Thoma!
= Chalmers, in the dark hour of The
4 church's disruption, played kite for re
fD1 h,r II
daughter-and the busy Christ said t
the busy apostles, Come we apar
e awhile into the desert and rest your
y selves" And l have observed tina
: they who do not know how to rest d.
/, not know how to work. But hav
: to declare this truth today, that som
n of our fashionable watering-places ar
6 the temporal and the eternal destruc
s ton of "a multitude that no man ca
1, number" and, amid the congratula
5. tons of this season. and the prospec
lie OF the departure of many of you 70
;" the country, l must utter a warning
70 plain, earnest and unmistakable.
r The first temptation that is apt {
IL hover in this direction to leave you
g piety at home. You will send the do
: and cat and canary bird to be we
Ia cared for somewhere else; but til
Ia temptation will be to leave your rel
% glon in the room with the blinds dow
ie and the door bolted, and then you Wi
=, come back in the autumn to find thi
III II Is starved and suffocated, lyin
ie stretched on the rug, stark dead. Thel
10 is no surplus of piety at the watering
re places. l never knew any one to gro
very rapidly in grace at the Catski
III Mountain house, or Sharon Springs,
u the Falls of Montmorency. 1t is gel
y I, orally the case that the Sabbath is mo
IL of a carousal than any other day, al
there are Sunday walks, and Sund'
IN rides, and Sunday excursions. Eide
nd and deacons and ministers of religio
ev who are entirely consistent at hon
AT sometimes when the Sabbath dawns
a them at Niagara Falls or the Viii
nd Mountains, take a day to themselv'
II they go to church, it is apt to be
sacred parade and the discourse,