HOW TO GET STRONG
his head. 'His neck was clothed with thunder!' There was in him the magnificent animal as well as the proud and fiery intellect; and the whole frame quivered with pent-up excitement. The massive frames of O'Connell and John Bright are familiar to all."—Mathews's Oratory and Orators.
Now if, instead, these men had merely read a paper, precisely as most ministers do read their sermons today—would they likely have ever been heard of? Is not oratory as essential in your calling: in the great cause you are to support and urge home upon the hearts and lives of your hearers? And what have you done or are you doing to get and keep "the stout bodily frame"; "the bodily stamina"; "the brawny frame"; "the powerful digestive organs"; "the lungs of great aerating capacity"? Or "the closely knit" frame, and "the bodily activity and quickness of the athlete"—to have in you—and one of your richest possessions—the magnificent animal "as well as the proud and fiery intellect"? Look at those giants of the pulpit—Luther, Spurgeon, Beecher, and Moody—if you want to see exactly that "stout bodily frame" and those "powerful digestive organs, and lungs of great aerating capacity"; or at those nervy, superb men of wire and steel, Paul and Wesley. Study their lives, and see if they were not of this very closely knit type, and had not this very "bodily activity and quickness of the athlete." Ride horseback five thousand miles a year for fifty years with little John Wesley, as he rode; and you would have to be a good man, or you could not have stayed with him the distance—to say nothing of preaching a tithe even of his sermons.
How is it that two sermons a Sabbath—a hundred a year—five thousand in fifty years—wear you out, and you have to be sent every now and then to Europe for
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