"Avoid idleness,"
he says, "and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and
useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses
where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy,
healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but
of all employments bodily labour is the most useful, and of the
greatest benefit for driving away the devil."
Practical success in life depends more upon physical health than is
generally imagined. Hodson, of Hodson's Horse, writing home to a
friend in England, said, "I believe, if I get on well in India, it
will be owing, physically speaking, to a sound digestion." The
capacity for continuous working in any calling must necessarily
depend in a great measure upon this; and hence the necessity for
attending to health, even as a means of intellectual labour. It is
perhaps to the neglect of physical exercise that we find amongst
students so frequent a tendency towards discontent, unhappiness,
inaction, and reverie,--displaying itself in contempt for real life
and disgust at the beaten tracks of men,--a tendency which in
England has been called Byronism, and in Germany Wertherism. Dr.
Channing noted the same growth in America, which led him to make
the remark, that "too many of our young men grow up in a school of
despair.
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