INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL LIFE 53 



He was highly sensitive to pliysical influences, lie could not hear the 

 stoves of Germany, but required an open fire-place. lie was hyper- 

 sensitive to odors and delicate in his diet. He lived to be seventy 

 despite attacks of gout and, as his days were crowded with work, he 

 must have had a strong, though sensitive, constitution. 



Of modern preachers, Robert Hall was a sufferer for years from 

 renal colic, tliough he possessed great vitality. Jonathan Edwards was 

 frail and Channing was not robust, but there is a numerous company 

 who loom large in bodily impressiveness and health, and who show us 

 the possibilities of the religious genius lodged in a fitting temple. 



John Wesley " loved riding and walking, was an expert swimmer 

 and enjoyed a game of tennis." His journal has been called " the most 

 amazing record of human exertion ever penned by man." " On horse- 

 back he traveled more miles, spoke oftener and to more people than any 

 man who ever lived." " Eight thousand miles was his annual record 

 for many a long year, during each of which he seldom preached less 

 frequently than five thousand times." At eighty he writes, " I find no 

 more pain or bodily infirmities than at five and twenty," and he im- 

 puted this in part " to my still traveling four or five thousand miles 

 a year and to my constant preaching." 



Chalmers had a " great look " with his " large head, large chest, his 

 amplitude in every way " and his " erect, royal air." He " had a frame 

 of adamant, that bade defiance to the weather, and that actually exulted 

 in the wildness of the blast " as he hurried over the moors. Spurgeon's 

 body cast a shadow of no mean dimensions and he was in such vigor as 

 to do an immense amount of work. Brooks was a man of great 

 physique, who was so well that when taken with the grippe at fifty-five, 

 he exhibited the impatience with sickness characteristic of one who has 

 always been well by exclaiming, " How strange it all is, this being 

 sick ! " Beecher is another example of health and bodily vigor and it 

 is interesting to note that it was his great maxim to keep his body 

 " in first-rate working order, for he considers health to be a Christian 

 duty, and rightly deems it impossible for any man to do justice to his 

 mental faculties without at the same time attending to his physical 

 powers." From Bernard to Beecher is a long interval of time, but a 

 greater gap in ideas of the Christian life, and the last few examples 

 prove that bodily abuse is not essential to spiritual power. 



Among artists Leonardo, Eaphael and Michelangelo would hardly 

 be denied first place, and a second, later trio, Titian, Eubens and 

 Turner, would rank very high. Eaphael died at thirty-seven. He was 

 beautiful, with an almost delicate face, but there is no history of sick- 

 ness or any bodily weakness. Just prior to his sudden death from 

 plague he had entered into a contract for an arduous piece of work. 

 Leonardo, " painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mechanical engineer 



