Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 August 1890 — THE SUMMER RESORTS [ARTICLE]

THE SUMMER RESORTS

TEMPTATIONS STREWN IN THE PATHS OP IDLENESS. Danger* BMettfagThese Who Would Boat —An Artificial Lifo, who o Ut« la Do throned—Dr. Talma ge'i Sermon. Rev. Dr.Talmage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. Text: Mark vL, 31. He said: Here Christ advises his apostles to take a vacation. They have ueen li ing an excited as well as a useful life, and He advises that they go out into the oountry. lam glad that, for longer er shorter time, multitudes of our peo- > pie will have summer vacation. The ■ railway trains are being laden with passengers and baggage on their way to tbb mountains and the seashore. Multitudes of our citizens are packing their trunks for a restorative absence. Tho city heats are pursuing the people with torch and fear of sunstroke. The long-silent halls of sumptuous hotels arekll abuzz with excited arrivals. iThe erystalline aurfaoe of/Rinnipisoogee Is shattered with the stroke of Bteamers laden with excursionists. The antlers of Adirondack deer rattle under the shot of eity sportsmen. The trout makes fatal snaps at the hooks of adroit anglers and toss their spotted brilliance into the game basket. Already the baton of the orchestral leader 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-baized billiard tables, and the jolting of the barroom goblets, and the explosive uncorking of champagne t bottles, and the whirl and the ru9tle of the ballroom dance, and the olattering hoofs of the race courses, attest that the season for the great American watering place*, ia fully inaugurated, Music—flute and drum and cornet-a-pis ton and clapping cymbals—Will wake the echoes of the mountains. Glad am I that fagged out American life, for the most part, will have an opportunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed will find a Bethssda. I believe in watering places. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the clerks, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient the physician, or the church its pastor, a season of Inoccupation. But I have to declare this truth today, that some of our fashionable watering places are the temporal and eternal destruction of “a 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 I must utter a note of warning—plain, earnest and unmistakable. The first temptation that is apt to hover in this direction is to leave your piety all at home. You will send the the dog and cat and canary bird to be well eared for somewhere else; but the temptation will be to leave your religion in the room with the blinds down and the door bolted, and then you will come back in the autumn to learn 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 fashionable 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 deaeons 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 themselves. If they go to the church, it is apt to be a saored parade, and the discourse, instead of being a plain talk about the soul, is apt to be what is called a crack sermon—that is. 6ome discourse picked out of the egusions of the year as the one most adapted to exeite 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 pioturesqueness of half-dis-closed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with $2,000 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.” Thera are Christians who in three or four weeks in such a place have had suoh terrible rents made in their Christian robes that they had to keep darning it until Christmas to get it mended! The health of a great many people makes an annual vißit 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 surrounded by guffaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from these institutions. which propose to imitate on this side of the water the iniquities of old-time Baden-Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health keep pace with your physical recuperation, and remember that all the waters of Hathorne and sulphur and chalybeaten springs can not do you so much good as the mineral, healing, perennial flood that breaks forth from the “Rock of Ages.”

Another temptation around nearly all our watering-places is the horse* racing business. We all admire the horse. There needs to be a redistribution of coronets among the brute creation. For ages the lion has been called the king of beasts. I 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 affeotion or usefulness. He is semi-human, and knows how to reason on a small soale. The centaur of olden times, part horse and part men, as—as to be a suggestion of the

fact that Hie hone is something more than a beast But we de sot think that Die speed of the horse should be cultured at the expense of human degradation. Horse races, in olden times, were under the ban of Christian people, and in our day tire same institution has come up under fictitious names, and it is called a “summer meeting,” almost suggestive of positive religious exercises. And it is ealled an “agricultural fair,” suggestive of every thing that is improving in the art of farming. But tinder these deceptive titles] are the same cheating and the same betting, the same drunkenness and the same vagabondage and the same abominations that were to be found under the old horsey-racing system. I never knew -a man yet who oould give himself to the pleasure of the turf for a long reach of time, and not be battered in morals. They hook up their spanking team, and put on their sporting cap, and light their cigar, and take the reins and dash down the road to perdition. The great day at 1 Saratoga, and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the other water-.

ing places is the day of the races. The hotels are thronged, nearly every kind of equipage is taken up at an almost fabulous price, and there are many respectable people mingling with jockeys, and gamblers, and libertines, and foul-mouthed 1 men and flashy women. The bartender »tirs up the brandy smash. The bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their money soon enough to lose, it. Three weeks before the race takes place the struggle is decided, and the men in the secret know on which steed to bet their money. The two men on the horses riding around long before arranged who shall beat. Ah! my friends, have nothing to do with horse racing dissipations this summer. Long ago the English government got through looking to the turf for the dragoon and light cavalry horse. They found that the turf depreciates the stock, and it is yet worse for men. Thomas Hughes, the member of Parliament and the author, known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started in this covrmtry, wrote a letter in which he said: “Heaven help you, then. For of all tho cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality bolding its head high, to this belauded institution of the British turf.” Another famous sportsman writes: • ‘How many fine domains have been shared among these hosts of rapacious sharks during the lasjlSjQO years; and unless the Bystem yKkaltered, how many more are doonpa.mFfell into the same gulf !" The fluke of' Hamilton, through his horsefracing proclivities, in three years his entire fortune of $350,000, will say that some of you are being Undermined by it. With the bull fights of Bpain and the bear baitings of the pit, may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse racing of England and America.

I go further, and speak of another temptation that hovers over the watering places; and this is the temptation to sacrifice physical strength. The modern Bethesda was meant to recuperate the physical strength; and yet how many come from watering places, their health absolutely destroyed! New York and Brooklyn idiots boasting of having imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before breakfast. Families accustomed to going to bed at 10 o'clock at night gossipping until 2 o’clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their health, mingling ice creams and lemons and lobster salads, and cocoanuts until the gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentations and protest. Delicate women and brainless young men chassezing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy. Thousands of men aud women coming back from our watering places in the autumn with the foundations laid for ailments that will last them all their life long. You know as well as I do that this is the simple truth. Another temptation hovering around the watering place is to the formation of hasty and life-long alliances. The watering places are responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country tbaß all other things combined. Society is so artificial there that no sure judgment of character can be formed. Those who form companionships amid such circumstances go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to one prize. In the severe tug of life you want more than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball room where the music decides the Btep, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail can pot make up for lack of strong common sense. You may as well go among the gaily painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go among the light spray of a summer watering place to find character that can stand the test of the great struggle of human Hie. Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a laee fan or a croquet mallet* The load of life is so heavy that, in order to draw it, you want a team stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper and a feminine butterfly.

If there is any man in the co mmunity that excites my contempt, and that excites the contempt of every man and woman, it is the soft-handed, softheaded fop, who, perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his summer in taking killing attitudes, and waving sentimental adieus, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid-gloves. Boots as tight ah an Inquisition, two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat, his conversation made up of “Ah's and “Oh’s” and "He-hee's.” ft would take 600 Of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calf-foot jelly. There Is only one counterpart to

f * such a man as feat* and that t» tha frothy young woman at tho wateringplace, her conversation made up of French moonshine; what she has on her head equaled only by what she has on her back; useless ever since she was born, and to be useless until she is dead, and what they will do with her in the next world J do not know, except to set her upea .the banks of the River of Life for all eternity to look sweet! God intends uS to admire music and fair faces and graceful step, but amid the heartlessnsas and the inflation and the fantastic influences of our; modern watering places, beware how you make life long covenants! Another temptation that will hover over the watering place is that of baneful literature. Almost every one starting off for the summer takes some reading matter. It is a book out of the' library or off the book-stand, or, bought of the boy hawking books: through the cars. I really believe' there is mere pestiferous trash read' among the intelligent classes in July \ and August than in all the other ten' months of the, year. Men and women 1 Who at home would not MaattefiedL’

with a book that was not really sensible, I found sitting on hotel piazzas or under trees reading books, the index 1 of which would make them blush if they knew that you knew what the book was. , Literary poison in August is as bad as literary poison in December. Mark that Do not let the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing press jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White Mountain valise. Another temptation hovering all around eur watering places is the intoxicating beverage. lam told that it is becoming more and more able for women to drink. I care not how well a woman may dress, if she has taken enough of wine to flush her cheek and put glassiness on her eye, she is intoxicated. She may be handed into a $2,500 carriage, and have diamonds enough to confound the Tiffany’s—she is intoxicated. She may be a graduate of a great institute and the daughter of some man in danger of being nominated for the Presidency—she is drunk. You may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you may say in regard to her that she is “convivial,” or she is “merry,” er she is “festive,” er she is “exhilarated, ” but you cannot, with all your garlands of verbiage, cover up the plain fact that it is an old-fashioned case of drunk. Now, the watering places are full of temptations to men and women to tipple. At the close of the tenpin or billiard game they tipple. At the elese of the eotillien they tipple. Seated on the piazza cooling themselves off they tipple. The tinged glasses come around with bright straws and they tipple. First they take * 'light wines.” as they call them; but light wines are heavy enough to debase the appetite. There is not a very long road between champagne at $5 a bottle and whisky at five cents a glass.

My friends, whether you tarry at home—which will be quite as safe and perhaps quite as comfortable—or go into the country, arm your self against temptation. The grace of God is the only safe shelter, whether in town or country, There are watering places accessible to all of us. You cannot open a book of the Bible without finding Out some suoh watering place. Fountains open for sin and unoleaaliness, wells of salvation, streams from Lebanon, flood struck out of the rook by Moses, fountains in the wilderness discovered by Hagar, water to drink and water to bathe in, the river of God which is full of water; water of which, if a man drink, he shall never thirst; wells of water in the Valley of Baca, living fountains of water, a pure river of water as clear as crystal from under the throne of God. - These are watering-places accessible to all of us. We do not have a laborious packing up before we start—only the throwing away of our transgressions. No expensive hotel bills to pay; it is “without money and without price.” No long and dirty travel before we get there; it is only a step away. In California, in five minutes, I walked around and saw ten fountains, all bubbling up, and they were all different. And in five minutes I can go through this Bible parterre and find you fifty bright, sparkling fountains bubbling up into certain life. A chemist will go into one of these summer watering places and take the water and analyze it, and tell you that it contains so, much of iron, and so much of soda, and so much of lime, and so much of magnesia. I come to this Gospel well, this living fountain and analyze the water, and I find that its ingredients are peace, pardon, forgiveness, hope, comfort, life, heaven. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye” to this watering place 1 Crowd around this Bethesda to-day! Oh. you sick, you lame, you troubled, you dying—crowd around this Bethesda! Step hi it! Oh, step in it! The angel of the covenant to-day stirs the water. Why do you not step in it? Some of you are too weak to take a step in that direction. Then we take you up in the arms of our closing prayer and plunge you clean undef the waves, hoping that the cure may be as sudden and as radical as with Captain Naaman, who. blotched and carbunoled, stepped into the Jordan, and after the seventh dive came up, his skin roseate complexioned as the flesh of a little ohild. The annual convention of the National Association of Factory Inspectors will be held in the Aldemnanic Chamber, New York, commencing August 27. Chiefs and deputies will present from New York. New Jersey, Massachusetts. Maine. Rhode Island. Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada. Rufus Wade, Chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. Is President, and John Franey, of New York, Vloe-Presideak