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.  We do not think it worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, as everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime.  But we do take it 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 we doubt not to 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, to our thinking, 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.  We knew a young Orthodox divine who lost his parish by swimming the Merrimac River, and another who 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.  We further remember a match, in a certain sea-side 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 presumption (as he afterwards confessed) that the best preacher would naturally be the worst bowler.  The athletic capacity, he thought, would be in inverse ratio to the sanctity.  We are happy 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.  We, too, repudiate it utterly.  Professor Peirce has proved by statistics that the best scholars in our colleges survive the rest; and we hold that virtue, like intellect, 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, Soulie, De Musset, De Bernard, Sue, and their compeers,—­it