The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 05, March, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 05, March, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
But, happily, times change, and saints with them. Our moral conceptions
are expanding to take in that "athletic virtue" of the Greeks, [Greek:
apetae gimnastikae] 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 Philammons 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 _anhaemia_, 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 blanched potato-plants in a cellar;
and then comes some vigorous youth from his out-door work or play, and
grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, the bat, or the
plough-handle. We distrust the achievements of every saint without a
body; and really have hopes of the Cambridge Divinity School, since
hearing that it has organized a boat-club.
We speak especially of men, but the same principles apply to women.
The triumphs of Rosa Bonheur and Harriet Hosmer grew out of a free and
vigorous training, and they learned to delineate muscle by using it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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