h is to come. Therefore, "exercise unto
godliness." "Take up those forms of spiritual athletics which develop
and discipline the soul. Keep your soul in training. Be sure that you
are in good spiritual condition, ready for the strain and effort which
life is sure to demand." We are often told in our day that the
athletic ideal is developed to excess, but the teaching of this passage
is just the opposite of {16} the modern warning. Paul tells this young
man that he has not begun to realize the full scope of the athletic
ideal. Is not this the real difficulty now? We have, it is true, come
to appreciate exercise so far as concerns the body, and any
healthy-minded young man to-day is almost ashamed of himself if he has
not a well developed body, the ready servant of an active will. We
have even begun to appreciate the analogy of body and mind, and to
perceive that the exercise and discipline of the mind, like that of the
body, reproduces its power. Much of the study which one does in his
education is done with precisely the same motive with which one pulls
his weights and swings his clubs; not primarily for the love of the
things studied, but for the discipline and intellectual athletics they
promote. And yet it remains true that a great many people fancy that
the soul can be left without exercise; that indeed it is a sort of
invalid, which needs to be sheltered from exposure and kept indoors in
a sort of limp, shut-in condition. There are young men in the college
world who seem to feel that the life of faith is too delicate to be
exposed to the sharp climate of the world of scholarship and {17} have
not begun to think of it as strengthened by exposure and fortified by
resistance.
Now the apostolic doctrine is this: "You do not grow strong in body or
in mind without discipline and exercise. The same athletic demand is
made on your soul." All through the writings of this vigorous,
masculine, robust adviser of young men, you find him taking the
athletic position. Now he is a boxer: "So fight I not as one that
beateth the air." Now he is a runner, looking not to the things that
are behind, but to the things before, and running, not in one sharp
dash, but, with patience, the race set before him. It is just as
athletic a performance, he thinks, to wrestle with the princes of the
darkness of this world, as to wrestle with a champion. It needs just
as rigorous a training to pull against circumstances as to pull
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