He was highly sensitive to physical influences, lie could not hear the stoves of Germany, but required an open fire-place. lie was hypersensitive to odors and delicate in his diet. He lived to be seventy despite attacks of gout and, as his days were crowded with work, he must have had a strong, though sensitive, constitution.
Of modern preachers, Robert Hall was a sufferer for years from renal colic, though he possessed great vitality. Jonathan Edwards was frail and Channing was not robust, but there is a numerous company who loom large in bodily impressiveness and health, and who show us the possibilities of the religious genius lodged in a fitting temple.
John Wesley "loved riding and walking, was an expert swimmer and enjoyed a game of tennis." His journal has been called "the most amazing record of human exertion ever penned by man." "On horseback he traveled more miles, spoke oftener and to more people than any man who ever lived." "Eight thousand miles was his annual record for many a long year, during each of which he seldom preached less frequently than five thousand times." At eighty he writes, "I find no more pain or bodily infirmities than at five and twenty," and he imputed this in part "to my still traveling four or five thousand miles a year and to my constant preaching."
Chalmers had a "great look" with his "large head, large chest, his amplitude in every way" and his "erect, royal air." He "had a frame of adamant, that bade defiance to the weather, and that actually exulted in the wildness of the blast" as he hurried over the moors. Spurgeon's body cast a shadow of no mean dimensions and he was in such vigor as to do an immense amount of work. Brooks was a man of great physique, who was so well that when taken with the grippe at fifty-five, he exhibited the impatience with sickness characteristic of one who has always been well by exclaiming, "How strange it all is, this being sick!" Beecher is another example of health and bodily vigor and it is interesting to note that it was his great maxim to keep his body "in first-rate working order, for he considers health to be a Christian duty, and rightly deems it impossible for any man to do justice to his mental faculties without at the same time attending to his physical powers." From Bernard to Beecher is a long interval of time, but a greater gap in ideas of the Christian life, and the last few examples prove that bodily abuse is not essential to spiritual power.
Among artists Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo would hardly be denied first place, and a second, later trio, Titian, Rubens and Turner, would rank very high. Raphael died at thirty-seven. He was beautiful, with an almost delicate face, but there is no history of sickness or any bodily weakness. Just prior to his sudden death from plague he had entered into a contract for an arduous piece of work. Leonardo, "painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mechanical engineer
