389. Summer Temptations

Summer Temptations

Mar_6:31 : ’93Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place and rest a while.’94

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 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 Winnepesaukee 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 barroom goblets, and the explosive uncorking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustle of the ballroom dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race-courses attest that the dissipations of the city which mar so many lives have been transferred from the city to the country. Music’97flute and drum and cornet-‘e0-piston and clapping cymbals’97will 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 hour of the church’92s disruption, played kite for recreation’97as I was told by his own daughter’97and the busy Christ said to the busy apostles, ’93Come ye yourselves apart unto a desert place and rest a while.’94 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, that some of our fashionable watering-places are the temporal and eternal destruction of ’93a multitude that no man can number,’94 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’97plain, earnest, and unmistakeable.

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 these resorts. 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 devote 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’97that 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 pennies into the poor-box; and then the benediction is pronounced and the farce is ended.

The hardest thing I ever tried to do was to be good at a watering-place. The air is bewitched with ’93the world, the flesh, and the devil.’94 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, 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 sulphur and chalybeate springs cannot do you so much good as the mineral, healing, perennial flood that breaks forth from the ’93Rock of Ages.’94 This may be your last summer. If so, make it a fit vestibule of heaven.

Another temptation around nearly all our watering-places is the horse-racing business. We all admire the horse. Job sets forth his strength, his beauty, his majesty, the panting of his nostrils, 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’97that meant war. A black horse’97that meant famine. A pale horse’97that meant death. A white horse’97that meant victory.

As the Bible makes a favorite of the horse, the patriarch, the prophet, the evangelist, and the apostle stroking his sleek hide, patting his rounded neck, 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. John Howard showed that he did not exhaust all his sympathies in pitying the human race, for when sick he writes home: ’93Has my old chaise-horse become sick or spoiled?’94

But the speed of the horse should not be improved 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 ’93Summer Meeting,’94 almost suggestive of positive religious exercises; and it is called an ’93Agricultural Fair,’94 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. Men 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 bartender stirs up the brandy smash. The bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their money only 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 have long before arranged who shall win.

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 furnish a grand harvest for the pickpockets, who carry off the pocketbooks and portemonnaies. Men looking on see only two horses with two riders flying around the ring; but there are men on that stand whose honor and domestic happiness and fortune’97white mane, white foot, white flank’97are in the ring, racing with inebriety and with fraud, with profanity and with ruin’97black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck and neck they go in that moral Epsom. White horse of honor, black horse of ruin. The white horse of honor is a little way ahead; the black horse of ruin, Satan mounted, all the time gaining on him. Here they come! Put on the lash. Dig in the spurs. There! They are past the stand. Just as I expected. The black horse of ruin has won the race, and all the galleries of darkness cry, huzza! and the devils come in to pick up their wagers.

Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with summer horse-racing dissipations. 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: ’93Heaven 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.’94 Another famous sportsman writes: ’93How 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!’94 The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of seventy thousand pounds, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it. With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baiting 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 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’92clock at night gossiping until one or two o’92clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams and lemons and lobster-salads and coconuts, 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: ’93Good-by, I am going to have a good time for a little while. I will be very glad to see you again in the autumn.’94 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: ’93Good-by, I am going.’94 You say, ’93Where are you going?’94 ’93Oh,’94 says Good Health, ’93I am going to take a vacation!’94 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’92s charge to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every watering-place: ’93Do thyself no harm.’94

Another temptation hovering around the watering-place is to the formation of hasty and lifelong alliances. The watering-places are responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country than all other causes 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 flash. Life is not a ballroom where the music decides the step; nor can bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail make up for strong common sense. You might as well go among the gaily 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 who excites my contempt, and who 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 fit 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 ’93Ahs,’94 and ’93Ohs,’94 and ’93He-hees.’94 It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calf’92s-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 of 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 lifelong 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 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 have met sitting on hotel-piazzas or under the trees reading books the titles of which would make them blush if they knew that you knew what the books were.

’93Oh,’94 they say, ’93you must have intellectual recreation!’94 Yes. There is no need that you take along into a watering-place ’93Hamilton’92s Metaphysics’94 or some heavy discourse on the eternal decrees or ’93Faraday’92s Philosophy.’94 There are many easy books that are good. You might as well say: ’93I propose now to give a little rest to my digestive organs, and instead of eating heavy meats and vegetables, I will, for a little while, take lighter food’97a little strychnine and a few grains of ratsbane.’94 Literary poison in August is as bad as literary poison in December. Mark that. Do not let the frogs of a corrupt printing-press jump 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’97the hero a Parisian roue, the heroine an unprincipled flirt’97chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of a hundred dollars a line? Throw out all that stuff from your summer baggage. Are there not good books that are easy to read’97books 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? 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.

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 two thousand five hundred dollar carriage and have diamonds enough to confound the Tiffanys’97she is intoxicated. She may be a graduate of Packer Institute, and the daughter of some man in danger of being nominated for the Presidency’97she is drunk. You may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you may say in regard to her that she is ’93convivial’94 or she is ’93merry’94 or she is ’93festive’94 or she is ’93exhilarated,’94 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 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 ’93light wines,’94 as they call them, but ’93light wines’94 are heavy enough to debase the appetite. There is not a very long road between champagne at five dollars a bottle and whisky 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 starts down to destruction Satan brings him to an inclined 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’97just 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 whisky and the sixth mile it is brandy, and then it gets steeper and steeper and steeper, and the man gets frightened and says, ’93Oh, let me get off!’94 ’93No,’94 says the conductor, ’93this is an express train, and it does not stop until it gets to the Grand Central Depot of Smashupton.’94 ’93Look not 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.’94 And if any of you young men should get astray this summer in this direction it will not be because I have not given you fair warning.

Whether you tarry at home’97which will be quite as safe and perhaps quite as comfortable’97or 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 cannot 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’97only the throwing away of our transgressions. No expensive hotel bills to pay; it is ’93without money and without price.’94 No long and dirty travel before we get there; it is only one step away. In California in five minutes I walked around and saw ten fountains, all bubbling up, and they were all different. In five minutes I can go 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, so much of soda, 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. ’93Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to this watering-place!’94

Crowd around this Bethesda and be refreshed! O you sick, you lame, you troubled, you dying’97crowd around this Bethesda! Step in it! Oh, step in it! The angel of the covenant 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.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage