saint,
dwelt in a cave in Ceylon. His devout visitors one day remarked on the
miraculous beauty of the legendary paintings, representing scenes from
the life of Buddha, which adorned the walls. The holy man informed them,
that, during his sixty years' residence in the cave, he had been too
much absorbed in meditation to notice the existence of the paintings,
but he would take their word for it. And in this non-intercourse with
the visible world there has been an apostolical succession, from
Chittagutta, down to the Andover divinity-student who refused to join
his companions in their admiring gaze on that wonderful autumnal
landscape which spreads itself before the Seminary Hill in October, but
marched back into the Library, ejaculating, "Lord, turn thou mine eyes
from beholding vanity!"

It is to be reluctantly recorded, in fact, that the Protestant saints
have not ordinarily had much to boast of, in physical stamina, as
compared with the Roman Catholic. They have not got far beyond Plotinus.
We do not think it worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, as
everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime. But we do take
it hard, that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles,
should have deliberately censured Juvenal's _mens sana in corpore sano_,
as a pagan maxim!

If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look
for comfort? Nothing this side of ancient Greece, we fear, will afford
adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies.
Pythagoras the sage we doubt not to have been identical with Pythagoras
the inventor of pugilism, and he was, at any rate, (in the loving words
of Bentley,) "a lusty proper man, and built as it were to make a good
boxer." Cleanthes, whose sublime "Prayer" is, to our thinking, the
highest strain left of early piety, was a boxer likewise. Plato was a
famous wrestler, and Socrates was unequalled for his military
endurance. Nor was one of these, like their puny follower Plotinus, too
weak-sighted to revise his own manuscripts.

It would be tedious to analyze the causes of this modern deterioration
of the saints. The fact is clear. There is in the community an
impression that physical vigor and spiritual sanctity are incompatible.
We knew a young Orthodox divine who lost his parish by swimming the
Merrimac River, and another who was compelled to ask a dismissal in
consequence of vanquishing his most influential parishioner in a