WHY MEN SHOULD EXERCISE DAILY
has worked himself up to position and wide influence; is it sensible to do what his humblest employé could rightly tell him is overcrowding; and so forcing the pace that he certainly cannot hold it? Instead of taking that position and that influence, and wielding them for greater ends, and improving them very markedly; must there not be a keen pang to their owner, when, tantalized with what seems surely within his grasp, that grasp itself weakens, and the machine goes all to pieces?
These later years are especially the precious ones to the wealthy man. They are his best days. Then his influence widens; and his savings, and his earnings too, accumulate as they did not when he was younger. Look at the work done by Vanderbilt, for example, accomplished almost thirty years after he was fifty-two! Did not the active out-door life on the little periauger of his youth; and the daily constitutionals which, notwithstanding his infirmities, all New-Yorkers saw him taking in later life, pay him? And are they less precious in any other line of life?
Look for a moment at the value health is to a man in any of the learned professions—of having a sound and vigorous body, with each branch of his vital system working regularly, naturally, and in harmony with the rest. Do these things make no difference to the divine? Had the sturdy, prize-fighter make of Martin Luther nothing to do with his contempt for the dangers awaiting his appearance before Charles V. and his Diet of Worms; and which caused him to say he would go there though the devils were as thick as the tiles on the houses? And with the grand stand he made for the religious light which now shines so freely upon the whole Christian world?
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