ming the Merrimac River, and another who was compelled to ask a dismissal in consequence of vanquishing his most influential parishioner in a game of tenpins; it seemed to the beaten party very unclerical. We further remember a match, in a certain sea-side bowling-alley, in which two brothers, young divines, took part The sides being made up, with the exception of these two players, it was necessary to find places for them also. The head of one side accordingly picked his man, on the presumption (as he afterwards confessed) that the best preacher would naturally be the worst bowler. The athletic capacity, he thought, would be in inverse ratio to the sanctity. We are happy to add, that in this ease his hopes were signally disappointed. But it shows which way the popular impression lies.
The poets have probably assisted in maintaining the delusion. How many cases of consumption Wordsworth must have accelerated by his assertion, that “the good die first”! Happily, he lived to disprove his own maxim. We, too, repudiate it utterly. Professor Peirce has proved by statistics that the best scholars in our colleges survive the rest; and we hold that virtue, like intellect, tends to longevity. The experience of the literary class shows that all excess is destructive, and that we need the harmonious action of all the faculties. Of the brilliant roll of the “young men of 1830,” in Paris,—Balzac, Soulié, De Musset, De Bernard, Sue, and their compeers,—it 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, úρɛтὴ γυμνaστικὴ, 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 Philammnons 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 anhæmia, 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
