Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our discipline.  Life would get nauseating if it were all honey.  That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle.  We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic.  If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better.  Blustering March and weeping April prepare us for shining May.  This world is a poor hitching post.  Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of the window, watching to see us come up.

Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest.  The governor replied: 

No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness and power.  It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough, but is wanting in moral muscle.  It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting, and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.

One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called Christian literature.  The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims.  A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket.  Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle.  If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still.  There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious.  He who stands with irksome repetitions asking people to “Come to Jesus,” while he gives no strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of men.  If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has nothing to write which can gather up and master the thoughts and feelings of men, his writing and speaking are a slander on the religion which he wishes to eulogize.

Morbidity in religion might be partially cured by more out-door exercise.  There are some duties we can perform better on our feet than on our knees.  If we carry the grace of God with us down into every-day practical Christian work, we will get more spiritual strength in five minutes than by ten hours of kneeling.  If Daniel had not served God save when three times a day he worshiped toward the temple, the lions would have surely eaten him up.  The school of Christ is as much out-of-doors as in-doors.  Hard, rough