Barton County democrat. [volume] (Great Bend, Kan.) 1885-1915, 1899-08-25
SUMMER VACATIONS.
DR.. Ta1mage Draws Some Lessons
from Our Annual Outings.
Dangers and Temptations That Sur
round Our Watering Places
Necessity of a Period of
InOccupation.
Copyright. 1899. by Louis Klopseh.l

w dSAiIiS lOhs aug -o'
At this season of the year, when all
who can get a vacation are taking 1t,
this discourse of DIR. Talmage is sug-
gestive and appropriate. The text is
John So, 3: "a pool, which is called
in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having
five porches. In these lay a great multi
tude of impotent folk, of blind, halt,
withered, waiting for the moving OF the
water"
Outside the city of Jerusalem there
was a sanative watering place, the pop
ular resort for invalids. To this day
there is dry basin of rock which shows
that there may have been pool there
800 feet long, 40 feet wide and rs feet
deep. This pool was surrounded by i've
piaZzas. or porches, or bathing houses,
where the patients tarried until the
time when they were to step into the
water. So far as reinvigorating was
concerned, it must have been Sara
toga and Long Branch on small
scale; a bennington and a Brighton
combined-medical and therapeutic.
Tradition says that at 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 quail
ity, and after that the people would
come and get the medication. But 1
prefer the plain statement Of Scripture,
that at certain season an angel came
down and stirred up or troubled the wa
ter, and then the people came and got
the healing. That angel of God that
stirred up the Judaean watering place
had his counterpart in the angel of heal
ing who, in our day, steps into the min
eral waters of Congress or Sharon or
Sulphur Springs, or into the salt sea at
Cape May and Nahant, where multitudeS
who are worn out with commercial and
professional anXieties, as well as those
who are afflicted with rheumatic, neu-
raIgic and splenetic diseases, go and are
cured by the thousands. These blessed
Bethesdasa 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
dack deer rattle under the shot of city
sportsmen, the trout make fatal snap at
the hook of adroit sportsmen, who toss
their spotted brilliants into the game
basket; the baton of the orchestral lead
er taps the music stand on the hotel
green, and American life has put on
festal array, and the rumbling Of the
tenpin alley, and the crack of the ivory
Iol 1c on ha I1illi ard oh
and the jolting of the barroom goblets,
and the explosive uncorking of the
champagne bottles, and the whirl and
the rustic of the ballroom dance, and
the Gathering hoofs of the race courses
and other signs of social dissipat ton at
test that the season for the great Amer
lean 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 I
that fagged-out American life for the
most part has an opportunity to rest
and that nerves racked and DESTROYED
will find Bethesda. believe in water
ing places. They recuperate for active
service many who were worn out with
trouble or overwork. They are nation
al restoratives.
the clerk, or the employer the journey
man, or the patient the physician, or the
church its pastor q season of inoccupa-
ton. Luther used to sport with his
children; Edmund Burke used to caress
his favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers,
in the dark hour of the church's disrup-
ton, played kite for recreation-so I
was told by his own daughter-and the
-i-x 7 % h
Come We apart awhile into the desert
and rest yourselves" And have OBJ
served that they who do not know how
to rest do not know how to work. But
1 have to declare this truth to-day-that
some of our fashionable watering places
are the temporal and eternal destruc-
ton of "a multitudq that no man can
number" and amid the congratulations
of this season and the prospects of the
departure of many of you for the coun-
try 1 must utter warning, plain, ear
nest and unmistakable.
The first enptation that is apt to
hover in this direction is to leave your
piety 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 religion in the
room with the blinds down and the
doors bolted, and then you win come
back in the autumn to find that it is
starved and suffocated, lying stretched
on the rug, stark dead. There is no sur
plus of piety at the watering places. I
never knew anyone to grow very rapid
" in grace at the Catskill Mountain
house or Sharon Springs or the Falls of
Montmorency. It is generally the case
that the Sabbath is more of carousal
than any other day, and there are Sun
day walks, and Sunday rides, and Sun
day excursions. Elders and deacons
and ministers of religion who are en-