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.