Population, again, and bodily health and vigor, are things which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way as in England.  Both are really machinery; yet how many people all around us do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them!  Why, one has heard people, fresh from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar-General’s returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right!

But bodily health and vigor, it may be said, are not to be classed with wealth and population as mere machinery; they have a more real and essential value.  True; but only as they are more intimately connected with a perfect spiritual condition than wealth or population are.  The moment we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent and vulgarizing a worship as that is.  Every one with anything like an adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly marked this subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily vigor and activity.  “Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable unto all things,"[398] says the author of the Epistle to Timothy.  And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:—­“Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind."[399] But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and limited character, this point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus:  “It is a sign of[Greek:  aphuia],” says he,—­that is, of a nature not finely tempered,—­“to give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about riding.  All these things ought to be done merely by the way:  the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern."[400] This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek word[Greek:  euphuia], a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it:  a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites “the two noblest of things,”—­as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most