The time is coming—­indeed has come—­when every writer will divide the subject of education into physical, moral, and intellectual.  We recognize theoretically that physical education is the basis of all education.  From the time of Plato down to the time of Horace Mann and Herbert Spencer that has been the theory.  It has also been the theory of German educators.  The idea that the mind is a distinct entity, apart from the body, was a theological idea that grew out of the reaction against pagan animalism.  The development of the body among the Greeks and Romans was followed by those brutal exhibitions of physical prowess in the gladiatorial contests where the physical only was cultivated and honored.  With the dawn of Christianity a reaction set in against this whole idea of developing the body.  They thought no good could come from its supreme development, because they had seen so much evil.  The priests represented the great danger which accompanied this physical training without moral culture, and there is no doubt that they were right to a certain degree.  Give a man only supreme physical education, without any attention to the moral and intellectual, and he will go to pieces like our prize-fighters and athletes.  But the Christians went to the other extreme.  They practiced the most absurd system of asceticism, depriving themselves of natural food and rest, and, of course, the results which followed on a grand scale were just what would follow in the individual.  Let a person follow the course they did, denying himself necessary raiment and food, taking no exercise, and living in retirement, and nervous prostration will follow, and hysterical disturbances and troubles.  This result in the individual was found on a large scale throughout Christendom.  The idea that the Christians brought down from the very earliest dawn of Christianity, that the body and soul are distinct, and that whatever is done to mortify the flesh increases the spiritual, life, has a grain of truth in it.  There were men in our army who, half-starved, marched through the Southern swamps in a state of exaltation.  They imagined they were walking through floral gardens, with birds flitting about and singing overhead.  But it was an unnatural, morbid state.  So priests deprived themselves of food, and reduced themselves to the lowest extent physically, and then saw visions; and were in an exalted mental state.  But it was morbid.  If a man sit up till twelve o’clock to write on a certain theme, he may not have a single idea until that hour; but then his mind begins to work, and perhaps he can work better than under any other circumstances.  But his condition is abnormal.  It does not represent the man’s true state of health.  He is gaining that momentary advancement of power at terrible cost.