Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian. In spite of a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease [[38]]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at the night-shift of the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had [[39]]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.
According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples [[40]]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of an anti-physical fanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering [[41]]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practiced castration as the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school. [[42]]
Trials of strength and of skill,
Rewarded by festive assemblies,
Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the muses
Answered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,
quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became a Golgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”