There is a vulgar prejudice among many of the most refined and religious people against the training of the body to its highest condition, as if that necessitated an animality fatal to the richest action of mind, heart, and soul. The fop whose delicacy is so exquisite that the least shock of vigorous emotion makes him turn pale and sicken, fancies the superb athlete a vulgar creature whose tissues are as coarse as wire netting and the globules of his blood as big as peas. But in reality the presence of fidgeting nerves in place of reposeful muscles gives feebler reactions, not finer ones, a more irritable consciousness, not a richer one. Were this squeamish prejudice well founded it would make God seem a bungler in his work, essential discord inhering in its different parts. It is not so. The harmonious development of all portions of our being will raise the whole higher than any fragment can be lifted alone. The two finest and loftiest and richest flowers of Greek genius, Plato and Sophocles, were both crowned victors in the Olympic games. But this strong, lazy prejudice has widely fulfilled itself in fact by limiting the greatest triumphs of physical culture to the more debased and profane types,—to professional dancers and pugilists. And even here it is to be affirmed that, on this low range of brawn and pluck and skill, physical power and prowess are better than physical weakness and cowardice. It is better, if men are on that level, to surpass and be admired there than to fail and be despised there. But since one God is the Creator of flesh and spirit, both of which when obedient are recipients of his influx and held in tune by all his laws, the best material states are not hostile, but most favorable, to the best spiritual fulfilments. The life of the mind will lift out of, not mire in, the life of the body. And hitherto unknown revelations of inspired power, delight, and longevity wait on that future age when the vindication of a divineness for the body equally sacred with that of the soul shall cause the choicest persons to be as faithful in physical culture for the perfection of their experience as prize-fighters are for winning the victory in the ring. Give us the soul of Channing, purest lover and hero of God, in the body of Heenan, foremost bruiser and champion of the world; the soul of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, tender poetess of humanity, in the body of Fanny Elssler, incomparable queen of the stage;—and what marvels of intuitive perception, creative genius, irresistible authority, and redemptive conquest shall we not behold!