Audubon Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Iowa) 1894-1925, 1899-08-31
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
HEALTH REsoRTS." THE SUB
JECT LAST SUNDAY.
"A Pool That Is Called In the Hebrew
Tongue Bethesda, Having Five Porch
es, Where Lay Great Multitude of
Impotent Folk" John W, 2, 8.


Outside the city of Jerusalem there
was sanative watering place, the pop
ular resort for invalids. To this day
there is a dry basin of rock which
shows that there may have been a 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, 1t
must have been Saratoga and a Long
Branch on a small scale; Leaning
ton and 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 quality, and after
that the people would come and get
the medication; but prefer the plain
statement of Scripture, that at a 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,
go and are cured by the thousands.
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
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 trout 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 1 that tagged out American
life, for the most part, has an oppor-
tunity to rest, and that nerves racked
and destroyed will find a Bethesda. I
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, or the patient the physician,
or the church its pastor, a season of
1noccupation. 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 disruption, played kite for re-
creation-so / was told by his own
daughter-and the busy Christ said to
the busy apostles, "Come We apart
awhile into the desert and rest your
selves" And I have observed that
they who do not know how to rest do
not know how to work. But l have
to declare this truth today, that some
of our fashionable watering places are
the temporal and the eternal destruc-
ton of "a multitude that no man can
number" and, amid the congratula-
SAoAo ~ SAio SOuooI, anu Tic
of the departure of many of you for
| the country, 1 must utter a warning,
plain, earnest and unmistakable.
The first temptation that is apt to
hover in this direction 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 reli
gion 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. never knew any one to grow
very rapidly in grace at the Catskill
Mountain house, or Sharon Springs, or
the Falls of Montmorency. 1t is gen.
orally 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
| 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 day to themselves
If they go to church, it is apt to be a
sacred parade, and the discourse, in
stead of being plain talk about the
soul, is apt to be what is called crack
sermon-that is, some discourse picked
out of the illusions of the year as the
one most adapted to excite admira-