erved
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 mine