"Come ye yourselves apart unto a desert place and rest
awhile."--MARK vi: 31.
Here Christ advises His apostles to take a vacation. They have been
living an excited as well as a useful life, and He advises that they
get out into the country. When, six weeks ago, standing in this place,
I advocated, with all the energy I could command, the Saturday
afternoon holiday, I did not think the people would so soon get that
release. By divine fiat it has come, and I rejoice that more people
will have opportunity of recreation this summer than in any previous
summer. Others will have whole weeks and months of rest. The railway
trains are being laden with passengers and baggage on their way to the
mountains and the lakes and the sea-shore. Multitudes of our citizens
are packing their trunks 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 crystalline surface of Winnipiseogee is
shattered with the stroke of steamer, laden with excursionists. The
antlers 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. 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 bar-room goblets, and the explosive
uncorking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustle of the
ball-room dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race-courses, attest
that the season for the great American watering-places is fairly
inaugurated. Music--flute and drum and cornet-à-piston and clapping
cymbals--will wake the echoes of the mountains.
Glad I am that fagged-out American life for the most part will have an
opportunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed will find a
Bethesda. I 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, a season of inoccupation. Luther
used to sport with his children; Edmund Burke used to caress his
favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hours of the church's
disruption, played kite for recreation--as I was told by his own
daughter--and the busy Christ said to the busy apostles: "Come ye
apart awhile into the desert and rest yourselves." And I have observed
that they who do not know how to rest do not know how to work.
But I have to declare this truth to-day, 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.
I. 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 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 find 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 Catskill Mountain House, or Sharon
Springs, or the Falls of Montmorency. 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 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 the day to themselves. If
they go to the church, it is apt to be a sacred 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, some discourse picked out of
the effusions of the year as the one most adapted to excite
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 picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls
stand in the organ-loft and squall a 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 toughest thing I ever tried to do was to be good at a
watering-place. The air is bewitched with "the world, the flesh, and
the devil." There are Christians who in three or four weeks in such a
place have had such terrible rents made in their Christian robe that
they had to keep darning it until Christmas to get it mended! The
health of a great many people makes an annual visit to some mineral
spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, 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 those
institutions which propose to imitate on this side the water the
iniquities of 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 chalybeate springs can not do you
so much good as the mineral, healing, perennial flood that breaks
forth from the "Rock of Ages." This may be your last summer. If so,
make it a fit vestibule of heaven.
II. 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 affection or usefulness. He is
semi-human, and knows how to reason on a small scale. The centaur of
olden times, part horse and part man, seems to be a suggestion of the
fact that the horse is something more than a beast.
Job sets forth his strength, his beauty, his majesty, the panting of
his nostril, the pawing of his hoof, and his enthusiasm for the
battle. What Rosa Bonheur did for the cattle, and what Landseer 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 procession and into every great occasion and into every
triumph. It is very evident that Job and David and Isaiah and Ezekiel
and Jeremiah and John were fond of the horse. He came into much of
their imagery. A red horse--that meant war; a black horse--that meant
famine; a pale horse--that meant death; a white horse--that meant
victory.
As the Bible makes a favorite of the horse, the patriarch and the
prophet and the evangelist and the apostle, stroking his sleek hide,
and patting his rounded neck, and tenderly lifting his exquisitely
formed hoof, and listening with a thrill to the champ of his bit, so
all great natures in all ages have spoken of him in encomiastic terms.
Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarize from the description
of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow any one irreverently to
touch his old war-horse, Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen
hours without dismounting at Waterloo; and when old Copenhagen died,
his master ordered a military salute fired over his grave. John
Howard showed that he did not exhaust all his sympathies in pitying
the human race, for when sick he writes home: "Has my old chaise-horse
become sick or spoiled?"
But we do not think that the 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 the same institution
has come up under fictitious names, and it is called a "Summer
Meeting," almost suggestive of positive religious exercises. And it is
called an "Agricultural Fair," suggestive of everything that is
improving in the art of farming. But under 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 horse-racing system.
I never knew a man yet who could give himself to the pleasures 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 Saratoga, and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly
all the other watering-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 men and flashy
women. The bar-tender stirs 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.
Leaning from the stand or from the carriage are men and women so
absorbed in the struggle of bone and muscle and mettle that they make
a grand harvest for the pickpockets, who carry off the pocket-books
and portemonnaies. Men looking on see only two horses with two riders
flying around the ring; but there is many a man on that stand whose
honor and domestic happiness and fortune--white mane, white foot,
white flank--are in the ring, racing with inebriety, and with fraud,
and with profanity, and with ruin--black neck, black foot, black
flank. Neck and neck they go in that moral Epsom.
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 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 country, wrote a
letter, in which he said: "Heaven help you, then; for of all the
cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country
approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality holding 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 last two hundred years; and
unless the system be altered, how many more are doomed to fall into
the same gulf!" The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing
proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of
£70,000, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it.
With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit may the
Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse-racing of England
and America.
III. 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 intended to recuperate the physical
health; and yet how many come from the 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 ten o'clock at night gossiping until one
or two o'clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about
their health, mingling ice-creams, and lemons, and lobster-salads, and
cocoa-nuts, until the gastric juices lift up all their voices of
lamentation and protest. Delicate women and brainless young men
chassezing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy. Thousands of men and
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.
In the summer you say to your good health: "Good-bye, I am going to
have a good time for a little while. I will be very glad to see you
again in the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are hard at work in
your office, or store, or shop, or counting-room, Good Health will
come and say: "Good-bye, I am going." You say: "Where are you going?"
"Oh," says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation!" It is a poor
rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you
choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You coquetted with your good
health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you
in the winter-time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the jailer would be
an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every
watering-place: "Do thyself no harm."
IV. 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 than
all the 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 step, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail
can make up for strong common sense. You might as well go among the
gayly painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go
among the light spray of the summer watering-place to find character
that can stand the test of the great struggle of human life. Ah, in
the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a lace 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 community that excites my contempt, and
that ought to excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the
soft-handed, soft-headed 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-glove. Boots as tight as 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." It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a
teaspoonful of calves-foot jelly. There is only one counterpart to
such a man as that, and that is the frothy young woman at the
watering-place, her conversation made up of French moonshine; what she
has on her head only equaled 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 I do not know, except to set her
upon the banks of the River Life for eternity to look sweet! God
intends us to admire music and fair faces and graceful step, but amid
the heartlessness and the inflation and the fantastic influences of
our modern watering-places, beware how you make life-long covenants!
V. 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
bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking books through the cars. I
really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among the
intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten
months of the year. Men and women who at home would not be satisfied
with a book that was not really sensible, I found sitting on
hotel-piazzas or under the trees reading books the index of which
would make them blush if they knew that you knew what the book was.
"Oh," they say, "you must have intellectual recreation!" Yes. There is
no need that you take along into a watering-place "Hamilton's
Metaphysics" or some thunderous discourse on the eternal decrees, or
"Faraday's Philosophy." There are many easy books that are good. You
might as well say: "I propose now to give a little rest to my
digestive organs; and, instead of eating heavy meat and vegetables, I
will for a little while take lighter food--a little strychnine and a
few grains of ratsbane." 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.
Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning
some day when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered
romances--the hero a Parisian _roué_, the heroine an unprincipled
flirt--chapters in the book that you would not read to your children
at the rate of $100 a line? Throw out all that stuff from your summer
baggage. Are there not good books that are easy to read--books of
entertaining travel, books of congenial history, books of pure fun,
books of poetry ringing with merry canto, books of fine engravings,
books that will rest the mind as well as purify the heart and elevate
the whole life? My hearers, there will not be an hour between this
and the day of your death when you can afford to read a book lacking
in moral principle.
VI. Another temptation hovering all around our watering-places is the
intoxicating beverage. I am told that it is becoming more and more
fashionable for woman 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 eyes, she is intoxicated. She may be handed into a $2500
carriage, and have diamonds enough to confound the Tiffanys--she is
intoxicated. She may be a graduate of Packer 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," or she is "festive," or she is "exhilarated," but you can
not 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 close of the cotillon 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 whiskey
at five cents a glass.
Satan has three or four grades down which he takes men to destruction.
One man he takes up, and through one spree pitches him into eternal
darkness. That is a rare case. Very seldom, indeed, can you find a man
who will be such a fool as that.
When a man goes down to destruction Satan brings him to a plane. It is
almost a level. The depression is so slight that you can hardly see
it. The man does not actually know that he is on the down grade, and
it tips only a little toward darkness--just a little. And the first
mile it is claret, and the second mile it is sherry, and the third
mile it is punch, and the fourth mile it is ale, and the fifth mile it
is porter, and the sixth mile it is brandy, and then it gets steeper
and steeper and steeper, and the man gets frightened and says, "Oh,
let me get off!" "No," says the conductor, "this is an express train,
and it does not stop until it gets to the Grand Central Depot at
Smashupton." Ah, "look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it
giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last
it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." And if any young
man in my congregation should get astray this summer in this direction
it will not be because I have not given him fair warning.
My friends, whether you tarry at home--which will be quite as safe and
perhaps quite as comfortable--or go into the country, arm yourself
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 can not open a book of the Bible without finding out some such
watering-place. Fountains open for sin and uncleanliness; wells of
salvation; streams from Lebanon; a flood struck out of the rock 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 one step away. 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 get through this Bible _parterre_ and find you
fifty bright, sparkling fountains bubbling up into eternal life.
A chemist will go to 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!
Crowd around this Bethesda this morning! Oh, you sick, you lame, you
troubled, you dying--crowd around this Bethesda! Step in it! Oh, step
in it! The angel of the covenant this morning 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 under the wave, hoping that the cure may be as sudden
and as radical as with Captain Naaman, who, blotched and carbuncled,
stepped into the Jordan, and after the seventh dive came up, his skin
roseate-complexioned as the flesh of a little child.