(2.) Health is also a power. Vigor of muscle, nerve, and pulse, is a wonderful preparation for strong thinking, feeling, and action. Success ministers to health, and health to success: mutually helpful to each other, as thoughts to words and words to thoughts, or as effort to attainment and attainment to ever new effort. By far the great majority of those who have impressed their ideas and plans upon the world, have been men of abounding health.

(3.) Health is a joy. Mere animal health, where no power of thought is connected with it, to give quickness or sweetness to the flow of daily consciousness, is itself a constant source of pleasure. The air, earth, and sea, are each alive with happy creatures, gamboling, under the inspirations of health, in constant ravishment with their brief lease of life.

(4.) Health is also beauty. "God hath made everything beautiful in its time." Things inanimate abide usually as he has made them, or, if they change, change into forms and by processes of his direct contrivance. Throughout the whole domain of organic life, the same general principles prevail, except so far as man, by his abuses or neglects, perverts their original constitution or appointed uses and relations. "He" it is that "has turned the world upside down," and "subjected the same;" so that, through him, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." But for man, God would now see, in looking down upon the work of his hands, as at the creation, that "it was all very good." Any uninjured animal organism that has health, is whole, and is therefore in the state in which God made it to be; and that state is beauty. He can make nothing wrong. "All his works praise him." Wrong means wrung, twisted, out of shape. "All his works are done in truth." He can make nothing ugly in reference to the place which it is to occupy, or the ends which it is to accomplish. All the great intuitions and the instinctive decisions of his infinite nature would interdict it." He is not a God of confusion, but of order." "He cannot be tempted with evil," in any department of his sublime being. Beauty is the very brightness of his image, and is therefore distribu

ted as universally over all his works as the beams of his presence.

No cosmetics, no arts of dress, no studied adjustment of light and shade, can adorn the human face or form, like health. The perfection of all colors on earth is flesh color, which blends them all in one, in the mortal face of an immortal; and the perfection of that is seen only in the rosy tint of health. The glory of all forms on earth is the human form, in which the delicacy, dignity, grace, might, and majesty of all other animate forms are nicely balanced and harmonized together; and the glory of the human form can be maintained, in the strength and finish of its members and their functions, only by the ever-quickening impulses of health. The ancients, for this reason, had far more beauty of form than we, and were much more alive to its charms. Formosus, excelling in form, is the Latin word for beautiful, referring, like the kindred word speciosus, to the whole outward contour of the man. On heathen ground the human face never has been, and never can be, that "thing of beauty," which, in the light of Christianity, when all aglow with divine ideas and great heroic aims and impulses, it becomes. The heart has no such training there as qualifies it to interpret, or appreciate, or even receive into itself a demonstration of moral beauty, in either the works of God or the aspects of men. The very word face (facies from facio) implies, indeed, that this it is which makes the individual appearance of any one man what it really is. Here are presented the high signals of his own distinct personality. And yet it is not the grouping of the mere lineaments of the human visage, however fine, which constitutes its special glory; but the moral expression, breathed into them and filling them with its deep, inward illumination. The divine light of this higher beauty can be caught and kept in the features only under the power of the cross, and from the very reflection upon it of the heart of Christ, dying and triumphing while he dies.

2d. Large positive acquisitions of strength.

The duties of life are arduous. Health will answer the demands of a man's own nature upon itself. But there are burdens to be carried, enterprises to be undertaken, and haz

ards to be encountered by a true man, in behalf of a world whose social, civil, governmental, religious, and educational ideas and influences are, so many of them, false in their aims and mischievous in their results. Does an ordinary laborer need much strength in order to vex from the bountiful earth an abundant harvest; or an artisan, to work the metals into new forms, which are yet so willing to be melted, pounded, drawn, and tortured at his will; or a soldier, to go successfully through the field of battle, where the chances of an hour may, at any moment, disappoint the highest plans and the greatest efforts? Then what an estate of bodily vigor must he lay by with care, who is to be a fellow-laborer with God, in striving to erect everywhere, as each man is made and called of him to do, among the desolations of ruined humanity, as many temples of immortality as possible to his praise forever!

Many shrink back from labors and rewards, which greater preparations of strength would enable them to assume with gladness. One may sometimes serve God in the most acceptable of all ways, in getting ready to endure hardness, by and by, "as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." Not only do "they serve who wait," but they especially, who prepare themselves carefully to serve.

Positive vigor of nerve and muscle is one of the greatest necessities and duties of good men, at all times, and in these days peculiarly, when, to say the least, health and strength are rare commodities among scholars. An energetic will needs an energetic body with which to execute its purposes. And, when girding itself to endure with calmness any of earth's many dark or sorrowful experiences, the mind, however heroic in its bearing, needs to find, in planting its foot firmly for the shock, a sure foundation in the amount of its bodily vigor on which to stand. In running after the prizes of this life, and, much more after those of our high calling in Christ Jesus, the corruptible crowns of this world, or the crown immortal on high, a degree of diligence is required sufficient to cover the greatest possible outlay of energy and of time; and, in "enduring hardness" in the service of God, or struggling manfully against the changes, disappointments, and losses of

this world, the heavenly-minded and the earthly alike need all the aids that they can procure from the highest and best condition of the body.

3d. Grace.

The bodily powers are capable of very high culture, in a wide, comprehensive variety of details, which, aggregated, make a wonderful contrast in the result to what would have occurred in their absence. Health and strength, in one of true intellectual and moral elevation and refinement, will almost irresistibly produce grace in his looks, attitudes, gestures, tones, and motions. As certain thoughts, moods, and habits of the mind are expressed clearly in the all-revealing features of the face, and so painting can show us, in the well-drawn outer man, the inner-spirit that possesses him; so men, when sitting, standing, walking, speaking, and acting, at once disclose in their very postures and motions, and in the quality of their voices and manners, to the eye of every intelligent beholder, the hidden history of their ideas of themselves and of others, and the style of their impulses, intentions and tastes. All personal culture brings a rich harvest of pleasure to its possessor. The finished gentleman, indeed, as he bears about with him perpetually the consciousness of his own refined sensibilities, and gentle feelings, and generous sentiments, and cheerful, loving looks, tastes himself all the time the gratification occasioned to others by such characteristics of which they quaff only single draughts, at long intervals, in his presence. And yet the number of those who know any one of us in merely the most incidental and general manner, and who, therefore, obtain from us only the benefit to be gained in the most occasional way, is so much the great mass of those who know us at all-and here, for the same reason, lies so much of our whole field of action and influence in this life-that it becomes every one, who would be either manly or godly, to take heed that the multitude before whom he moves in so infrequent and momentary a way, still see in him, at all times, everything to admire and love, to desire and imitate. The leading grace, in the bearing of the outward man, is declared by the world at large, in the very designation of the word gentleman, to be gentle

ness.

Gentle and genteel are, in origin, the same, and denote facts quite as much connected with each other as the words used to describe them. No single word could so well epitomize all that belongs to real exterior refinement. Gentleness contains among its elements self-possession, self-restraint, the power of thought, regard for others, ideas of taste and subjective art, and habits of high self-culture. Gentleness was one of the highest manifestations that Christ made of his divinity when on earth, or that God makes perpetually of himself in his universal providence. On gentleness as its stock, any and every grace, internal and external, may be easily grafted; while without it all other personal refinements, of whatever sort, would soon become but withered flowers upon a broken

stem.

II. What, now, we ask briefly, are the means of gaining these ends described?

1st. Conformity to the laws and conditions, appointed for the body as such.

Not more truly are the planetary worlds under the power of exact mathematical law, or the mechanical and chemical forces and elements of nature, in their action, than the muscular, nervous, circulatory, respiratory, and vital energies, both severally and in combination, of the animal organism. The higher, indeed, the sphere of its applications, the more certain and absolute is the reign of law throughout the works of God. The conditions of bodily welfare pertain variously to the subjects of light, air, heat, diet, clothing, exercise, climate, occupation, and all the mental and moral habitudes of the mind. Health is the nice and even balance of many delicate and subtle elements and agencies, at work in every part of the complicated framework of our entire being. Some, in seeking to regain their health, attach quite too much importance to mere muscular exercise, which alone, as many well know, will do but little towards the thorough renovation of the physical system. Here, as in other things, "bodily exercise profiteth little" little, if not mixed largely with other and better things. A wide circle of many influences must be concentrated, as in the balancings of the spheres, on the point desired;