New Tabernacle Sermons

by T. De Witt Talmage

"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.