ral
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 on