Page images
PDF
EPUB

to offer unmeaning compliments. Men capable of elegant and elaborate conversation elsewhere sometimes feel called upon at the door of the drawing-room to drop their common sense and to dole out sickening flatteries. They say things about your dress, and about your appearance, that you know, and they know, are false. They say you Determined to

are an angel. You know you are not. tell the truth in office, and store, and shop, they consider it honorable to lie to a woman. The same thing that they told you on this side of the drawing-room, three minutes ago they said to some on the other side of the drawing-room. O, let no one trample on your self-respect. The meanest thing on which a woman can build her happiness is the flatteries of men.

Again: I charge you not to depend for happiness upon the discipleship of fashion. Some men are just as proud of being out of the fashion as others are of being in it. I have seen men as vain of their old fashioned coat, and their eccentric hat, as your brainless fop is proud of his dangling fooleries. Fashion sometimes makes a reasonable demand of us, and then we ought to yield to it. The daisies of the field have their fashion of color and leaf; the honeysuckles have their fashion of ear-drop; and the snowflakes flung out of the winter heavens have their fashion of exquisiteness. After the summer shower the sky weds the earth with ring of rainbow. And I do not think we have a right to despise all the elegancies and fashions of this world, especially if they make reasonable demands upon us; but the discipleship and worship of fash. ion is death to the body, and death to the soul. I am glad the world is improving. Look at the fashion plates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and you will find that the world is not so extravagant and extraordinary now as it was then, and all the marvellous things that the

granddaughter will do will never equal that done by the grandmother. Go still further back to the Bible times, and you find that in those times fashion wielded a more terrible scepter. You have only to turn to the third

chapter of Isaiah.

Only think of a woman having all that on! I am glad that the world is getting better, and that fashion which has dominated in the world so ruinously in other days has for a little time, for a little degree at any rate, relaxed its energies. Oh, the danger of the discipleship of fashion. All the splendors and the extravaganza of this world dyed into your robe and flung over your shoulder cannot wrap peace around your heart for a single moment. The gayest wardrobe will utter no voice of condolence in the day of trouble and darkness. That woman is grandly dressed, and only she, who is wrapped in the robe of a Savior's righteousness. The home may be very humble, the hat may be very plain, the frock may be very coarse; but the halo of heaven settles in the room when she wears it, and the faintest touch of the resurrection angel will change that garment into raiment exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth could whiten it. I come to you, young woman, to-day, to say that this world cannot make you happy. I know it is a bright world, with glorious sunshine, and golden rivers, and fire-worked sunset, and bird orchestra, and the darkest cave has its crystals, and the wrathiest wave its foam-wreath, and the coldest midnight its flaming aurora; but God will put out all these lights with the blast of his own nostrils, and the glories of this world will perish in the final conflagration. You will never be happy until you get your sins forgiven and allow Christ Jesus to take full possession of your soul. He will be your friend in every perplexity. He will be your comfort in every trial. He

will be your defender in every strait. I do not ask you to bring, like Mary, the spices to the sepulcher of a dead Christ, but to bring your all to the feet of a living Jesus. His word is peace. His look is love. His hand is help. Ilis touch is life. His smile is heaven. Oh, come, then, in flocks and groups! Come, like the south wind over banks of myrrh. Come, like the morning light tripping over the mountains. Wreathe all your affections for Christ's brow, set all your gems in Christ's coronet, pour all your voices into Christ's song, and let this Sabbath air rustle with the wings of rejoicing angels, and the towers of God ring out the news of souls saved!

"This world its fancied pearl may crave,

"Tis not the pearl for me;

"Twill dim its luster in the grave

"Twill perish in the sea.

But there's a pearl of price untold,

Which never can be bought with gold;
Oh, that's the pearl for me."

[ocr errors]

CHAPTER XII.

THE SINS OF SUMMER WATERING PLACES.

A pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having dve porches. In these lay a multitude of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.-John v: 2, 3.

Outside of the city of Jerusalem, there was a sensitive watering-place, the popular resort for invalids. To this day, there is a dry basin of rock which shows that there must 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 reinvigoration was concerned, it must have been a Saratoga and a Long Branch on a small scale; a Leamington and a Brighton combined-medical and therapeutic. Tradition says that at a 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 I prefer the plain statement of Scripture, that at a certain season, an angel came down and stirred up or troubled the water; and then the people came and got the healing. That angel of God that stirred up the Judean watering-place had his counterpart in the angel of healing that, in our day, steps into the mineral waters of Congress, or Sharon, or Sulphur Springs, or into the salt sea at Cape May and Nahant, where multitudes who are worn out with commercial and

professional anxieties, as well as those who are afflicted with rheumatic, neuralgic, and splenetic diseases, go, and are cured by the thousands. These Bethesdas are scattered all up and down our country, blessed be God!

We are at a season of the year when 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 steamers laden with excursionists. The antlers of Adirondack deer rattle under the shot of city sportsmen. The trout make fatal snap at the hook of adroit sportsmen, and toss their spotted brilliance into the game basket. Soon the baton of the orchestral leader will tap the music-stand on the hotel green, and American life will put 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, will attest that the season for the great American watering-places is fairly inaugurated. Music! Flute, and drum, and cornet-a-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. I go there sometimes. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient the physician,

« PreviousContinue »