The fashion of society in regard to the education and care of the body has passed through three phases. The most extraordinary phase, in the glorious results it secured, was the worship of bodily perfection among the Greeks, a reflex revival of which was shown by the nobles and knights at the period of the Renaissance. The Greek gymnastic of the age of Pericles, as described by Plato so often and with such enthusiasm,—a gymnastic in which music, instead of being an end in itself, a sensuous luxury of the soul, was made a guide and adjunct to bodily training, giving rhythm to every motion, or that grace and economy of force which so much enhances both beauty and power,—lifted men higher in unity of strength and charm of health and harmony of faculties than has anywhere else been known. The Grecian games were made an ennobling and joyous religious service and festival. The eager, emulous, patriotic, and artistic appreciation of the spectators,—the wondrous strength, beauty, swiftness, rhythmic motions, imposing attitudes of the athletes,—the legends of the presence and contentions of the gods themselves on that very spot in earlier times,—the setting up of the statues of the victors in the temples as a worship of the Givers of Strength, Joy, and Glory,— served to carry the interest to a pitch hardly to be understood by us. The sculptures by Phidias which immortalize the triumph of Greek physical culture show a harmony of the circulations, a compacted unity of the organism, a central poise of equilibrium, a profundity of consciousness and a fulness of self-control, a perfect blending of the automatic and the volitional sides of human nature, which must have exalted the Olympic victors at once to the extreme of sensibility and to the extreme of repose. It is a million pities that this ideal should ever have been lost. But in Rome, under the military drill and unbridled license of the emperors, it degenerated into a brutal tyranny and sensuality, the gigantic superiority of potency it generated being perverted to the two uses of indulging self and oppressing others. The next swing of the historic pendulum flung men, by the reaction of spirituality, over to the fatal opposite,—the ecclesiastic contempt and neglect of the body. The Christian ideal, or at least the Church ideal, in its scornful revulsion from gladiators and voluptuaries, glorified the soul at the expense of the loathed and mortified flesh. At the base of this cultus was the ascetic superstition that matter is evil, that the capacity for pleasure is an infernal snare, and that the only way to heaven is through material maceration and renunciation. Sound philosophy and religion teach, on the contrary, that the body is the temple of God, to be developed, cleansed, and adorned to the highest degree possible for His habitation.