their admiring gaze on that wonderful autumnal landscape which spreads itself before the Seminary Hill in October, but marched back into the library, ejaculating, "Lord, turn thou mine eyes from beholding vanity!" It is to be reluctantly recorded, in fact, that the Protestant saints have not ordinarily had much to boast of, in physical stamina, as compared with the Roman Catholic. They have not got far beyond Plotinus. It is scarcely worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, as everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime. But it does seem hard that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles, should have deliberately censured Juvenal's mens sana in corpore sano, as a pagan maxim! If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look for comfort? Nothing this side of ancient Greece, we fear, will afford adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies. Pythagoras the sage may or may not have been identical with Pythagoras the inventor of pugilism, and he was, at any rate, (in the loving words of Bentley,) "a lusty proper man, and built, as it were, to make a good boxer." Cleanthes, whose sublime "Prayer" is, doubtless, the highest strain left of early piety, was a boxer likewise. Plato was a famous wrestler, and Socrates was unequalled for his military endurance. Nor was one of these, like their puny follower Plotinus, too weak-sighted to revise his own manuscripts. It would be tedious to analyze the causes of this modern deterioration of the saints. The fact is clear. There is in the community an impression that physical vigor and spiritual sanctity are incompatible. Recent ecclesiastical history records that a young Orthodox divine lost his parish by swimming the Merrimac River, and that an other was compelled to ask a dismissal in consequence of vanquishing his most influential parishioner in a game of ten-pins; it seemed to the beaten party very unclerical. The writer further remembers a match, in a certain seaside bowling-alley, in which two brothers, young divines, took part. The sides being made up, with the exception of these two players, it was necessary to find places for them also. The head of one side accordingly picked his man, on the avowed presumption that the best preacher would naturally be the worst bowler. The athletic capacity, he thought, would be in inverse ratio to the sanctity. It is a satisfaction to add, that in this case his hopes were signally disappointed. But it shows which way the popular impression lies. The poets have probably assisted in maintaining the delusion. How many cases of consumption Wordsworth must have accelerated by his assertion that "the good die first"! Happily he lived to disprove his own maxim. Professor Peirce has proved by statistics that the best scholars in our colleges survive the rest; virtue, like intellect, doubtless tends to longevity. The experience of the literary class shows that all excess is destructive, and that we need the harmonious action of all the faculties. Of the brilliant roll of the " young men of 1830,” in Paris, Balzac, Soulié, De Musset, De Bernard, Sue, and their compeers, it is said that nearly every one has already perished, in the prime of life. What is the explanation? A stern one: opium, tobacco, wine, and licentiousness. "All died of softening of the brain or spinal marrow, or swelling of the heart." No doubt many of the noble and the pure were dying prematurely at the same time; but it proceeded from the same essential cause physical laws disobeyed and bodies exhausted. The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The delirium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of the pure and abstemious Southey. But, happily, times change, and saints with them. Our moral conceptions are expanding to take in that "athletic virtue" of the Greeks, åperǹ yvμvaσtɩký, which Dr. Arnold, by precept and practice, defended. The modern English "Broad Church" aims at breadth of shoulders, as well as of doctrines. Our American saintship, also, is beginning to have a body to it, a "Body of Divinity," indeed. Look at our three great popular preachers. The vigor of the paternal blacksmith still swings the sinewy arm of Beecher; Parker performed the labors, mental and physical, of four able-bodied men, until even his great strength yielded; and if ever dyspepsia attack the burly frame of Chapin, we fancy that dyspepsia will get the worst of it. This is as it should be. One of the most potent causes of the ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our community, is the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of a vigorous, manly life. There is a certain moral and physical anhæmia, this bloodlessness, which separates most of our saints, more effectually than a cloister, from the strong life of the age. What satirists upon religion are those parents who say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, "He is born for a minister," while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career! Never yet did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls, without living to repent it in maturity. These precocious little sentimen talists wither away like blanched potato-plants in a cellar; and then comes some vigorous youth from his out-door work or play, and grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, the bat, or the plough. Everybody admires the physical training of military and naval schools. But these same persons never seem to imagine that the body is worth cultivating for any purpose, except to annihilate the bodies of others. Yet it needs more training to preserve life than to destroy it. The vocation of a literary man is far more perilous than that of a frontier dragoon. The latter dies at most but once, by an Indian bullet; the former dies daily, unless he be warned in time, and take occasional refuge in the saddle and the prairie with the dragoon. What battle-piece is so pathetic as Browning's "Grammarian's Funeral"? Do not waste your gymnastics on the West Point or Annapolis student, whose whole life will be one of active exercise, but bring them into the professional schools and the counting-rooms. Whatever may be the exceptional cases, the stern truth remains, that the great deeds of the world can, be more easily done by illiterate men than by sickly ones. Wisely said Horace Mann, "All through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." And yet more eloquently it has been said by a younger American thinker, Wasson, "Intellect in a weak body is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket, — the richer he would be, under other circumstances, by so much the greater his danger now." Of course, the mind has immense control over physical endurance, and every one knows that among soldiers, sailors, emigrants, and woodsmen, the leaders, though more - delicately nurtured, will often endure hardship better than the followers, "because," says Sir Philip Sidney, "they are supported by the great appetites of honor." But for all these triumphs of nervous power a reaction lies in store, as in the case of the superhuman efforts often made by delicate women. And besides, there is a point beyond which no mental heroism can ignore the body, — as, for instance, in sea-sickness and toothache. Can virtue arrest consumption, or self-devotion set free the agonized breath of asthma, or heroic energy defy paralysis? More formidable still are those subtle influences of disease, which cannot be resisted, because their source is unseen. taire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime-minister; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world. Vol But part of the religious press still clings to the objection, that admiration of physical strength belonged to the barbarous ages of the world. So it certainly did, and so the race was kept alive through those ages. They had that one merit, at least; and so surely as an exclusively intellectual civilization ignored it, the arm of some robust barbarian prostrated that civilization at last. What Sismondi says of courage is pre-eminently true of that bodily vigor which it usually presupposes: it is by no means the first of virtues, but its loss is more fatal than that of all others. "Were it possible to unite the advantages of a perfect government with the cowardice of a whole people, those advantages would be utterly valueless, since they would be utterly without security." Physical health is a necessary condition of all permanent success. To the American people it has a stupendous importance, because it is the only attribute of power |