III

RADIANT VIGOR

In his strong, vivid, and inspiring poem "Rugby Chapel,” Matthew Arnold, in speaking of his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, the great master of Rugby, says:

"But cold,

Solemn, unlighted, austere

Through this gathering darkness, arise
The chapel walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father, art laid.

"There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the autumn evening; but ah!
That word 'gloom' to my mind
Brings thee back in the light
Of thy radiant vigor again.
In the gloom of November we passed
Days not dark by thy side;
Seasons impaired not the ray

Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear."

In the phrase "radiant vigor" we find epitomized the vital personality of the English schoolmaster, who to the youth of more than one generation was a veritable tower of strength, When Thomas Arnold became a candidate for the Headmastership of Rugby, it was pre

dicted that if he were elected, "he would change the face of education all through the public schools of England." This he did not do through any revolutionizing of the scholarship of his day, but, rather, by the contagion of a powerful personality. He had vigor of body and vigor of soul. It must be admitted that in general physical vigor is the basis of all strength. A strong intellect is mostly found in a strong body. Bodily health is conducive to a genuine spirituality. It is hard for a dyspeptic to be a saint. Samuel Johnson once said in his blunt way, "Every man is a rascal when he is sick." Seldom is the radiant, life-giving personality found in the tenement of clay of an invalid. No longer do we believe "mortification of the flesh" to be an act of piety.

"Let us not always say,

'Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground

Upon the whole!'

As the bird wings and sings

Let us cry, 'All good things

Are ours; nor soul helps flesh more now
Than flesh helps soul.""

The body is not to be looked upon as weight impeding the growth of the soul but, rather, as its helper and ally.

It cannot, however, be denied that in regard to the power of a strong body to invigorate the spirit there has been within recent years considerable empty verbalizing. In some circles it is the fashion to quote the hopelessly over-worked proverb, "Mens sano in corpore sano," as meaning that the possession of a sound body is incontrovertible evidence of the presence of a sound mind. I once heard an

address

upon what the speaker called "Muscular Christianity." His title may have been correct, for what he called Christianity was most emphatically neither intellectual nor spiritual. Sometimes the much-vaunted triangle of "body, mind, and spirit" is discussed in such a way as to cause the listener to believe that the first line of this hypothetical figure is of vastly more importance that the other two. But in spite of the callow vaporing of those who, in the worst sense of the phrase, possess "singletrack" minds, health of body as a factor in the development of the soul must not be minimized.

"Radiant vigor" is the most potent force of human dynamics. It is at the heart of all real teaching. Almost everybody who writes or speaks along educational lines has his own definition of education. Is there, however,

any of these formulations which comes nearer to hitting the nail square on the head than Thomas Carlyle's scintillating apothegm, “Fire kindled at the fire of living fire"? Real teaching is from the living, through the living and to the living. No pedagogical course can make a teacher of a gerund-grinding depersonalized pedant. Neither can a theological seminary transform such an one into a real preacher of the living word. The radiantly vigorous personality is, after all, the outgrowth of a great soul. The man of lean soul has no power of inspiration. Among the great preachers of the last century, like a mountain in the clear, cold air of morning, towers the radiant figure of Phillips Brooks. A Japanese student at Harvard, after hearing him one Sunday morning in Trinity Church, wrote: "Phillips Brooks! What struggling souls does he support and strengthen! What a depth under his surplice, what a broadness behind his prayer book! After a draught of his elixir a wayfarer marches on for a week or two with songs upon his lips; the rough earth with all its mountains and valleys leveled before him." More than one choice youth has caught new gleams of the vision splendid as through Dr. Allen's biography he comes into sympathetic contact with this big-souled prophet of the invisible. No

man stood nearer to the life of midnineteenthcentury America than Henry Ward Beecher. Eloquent, magnanimous, open-minded, sympathetic, and sincere, he spoke not alone to the congregation of Plymouth Church but to the American people. The source of this Herculean power lay in a personality of radiant charm and vigor. As George William Curtis once said, “How few of us can keep our balance when a regal soul dashes by." Character is not taught but caught. Human betterment comes through association with the best. In gauging the worth of a life it can be truly said, "So much personality, so much

Little is there which a man can do without finding his personality a help or a hindrance. For example, nervous, sinewy English sentences are never written by nonentities. The carry

ing power of a group of words depends upon the man behind them. An assumed vigor of expression on the part of a weakling becomes a shriek. The red-blooded virility of Rudyard Kipling is the genuine expression of the man. The numerous pitiful imitations of this poet who, at his best, belongs among the masters are in themselves evidences of the futility of trying to acquire the art of writing by beginning at the wrong end. The development of