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, [Greek:  apetae gimnastikae] which Dr. Arnold, by precept and practice, defended.  The modern English “Broad Church” aims at breadth of shoulders, as well as of doctrines.  Kingsley paints his stalwart Philammons and Amyas Leighs, and his critics charge him with laying down a new definition of the saint, as a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours.  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 temporarily 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.  It must be confessed that our saints suffer greatly from this moral and physical anhaemia, this bloodlessness, which separates them, 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 sentimentalists 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-handle.  We distrust the achievements of every saint without a body; and really have hopes of the Cambridge Divinity School, since hearing that it has organized a boat-club.

We speak especially of men, but the same principles apply to women.  The triumphs of Rosa Bonheur and Harriet Hosmer grew out of a free and vigorous training, and they learned to delineate muscle by using it.