PHYSICAL EDUCATION. g 



fate of those nations to whom salvation came too late ; on whose des- 

 tiny the curse of that superstition has been wrought out to the bitter 

 end. The attempt to carry the theories of the Hebrew fanatics into 

 practice led to a state of affairs against which tl^e unpossessed part 

 of mankind had to combine in sheer self-defense ; the maniacs were 

 overpowered, but only after a struggle which has trampled the chief 

 battle-fields into dust, and not before they had turned the Mediterra- 

 nean God-garden into such a pandemonium of madness, tyranny, and 

 wretchedness, that the lot of the African savages appeared heaven in 

 comparison. The annals of pagan despotism furnish no parallel to 

 the pages stained with blood and tears that record the horrors of the 

 inquisitorial butcheries and man-hunts of the middle ages. The his- 

 tory of science is the history of a day with a bright morning and a 

 sunny evening, but interrupted at the noontide hour by a total eclipse 

 of common sense and reason. The men that inculcated a belief in the 

 possibility of witchcraft and demoniac possession are responsible for 

 the agonies of the three million human beings that perished in the 

 flames of the stake ; the dogma of total natural depravity guided the 

 arm that aimed its poisoned daggers at the heart of every social, politi- 

 cal, or scientific reformer. But the direst of all the evils which made 

 the rule of the miracle-mongers the unhappiest period in the history 

 of this earth was, after all, their total neglect of physical education 

 the logical outQome of their Nature-hating insanity. Their disciples 

 were assured, in the name of an infallible revelator, that all earthly 

 concernments are vain ; that we can not please God without mortifying 

 our bodies ; that our natural instincts must be suppressed, in order to 

 qualify our souls for the Kew Jerusalem. The joys of Nature were 

 to be shunned as man-traps of the arch-fiend. Sickness was to be 

 cured by prayer and certain ecclesiastic ceremonies. " Bodily exer- 

 cise," we are informed, "profited but little." The Olympic games 

 were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor.* The health-code 

 of the Mosaic dispensation was repealed as unessential, and indeed 

 superfluous, in a community of miracle-workers who could defy the 

 laws of Nature with the aid of supernal spirits. Gluttony and be- 

 sottedness were encouraged by the example of the ministers of that 

 creed. Manly exercises, the festivals of the seasons, mirth, pastimes, 

 and health-giving sports were discouraged as unworthy of a true saint ; 

 the sons of the thaumaturgic church were taught that our natural de- 

 sires and natural dispositions are wholly evil ; that the study of world- 

 ly sciences is vain, and solicitude for the welfare of the body a proof 

 of an unreo-enerate heart. 



To these doctrines we owe the consequences of our countless sins 

 against the physical laws of God ; the many irretrievable losses by 

 the ruin of a former civilization ; the terrible night of the long cen- 

 turies when science was paralyzed, when industrial progress was lim- 



* " A. D." 394. 



