Testament, with the honour which it puts upon family and national
life, became precious to man, as it had never been before; and such
a history as David's became, not as it was with the mediaeval monks,
a mere repertory of fanciful metaphors and allegories, but the
solemn example, for good and for evil, of a man of like passions and
like duties with the men of the modern world.

These great truths, once asserted, could not but conquer; and they
will conquer to the end. All attempts to restore the monastic and
feminine ideal, like that of good Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding,
failed. They withered like hot-house exotics in the free, keen,
bracing English air; and in our civil wars, Cavalier and Puritan, in
whatever they differed, never differed in their sound and healthy
conviction that true religion did not crush, but strengthened and
consecrated a valiant and noble manhood.

Now if all that 'Muscular Christianity' means is that, then the
expression is altogether unnecessary; for we have had the thing for
three centuries--and defective likewise, for it is not a merely
muscular, but a human Christianity which the Bible taught our
forefathers, and which our forefathers have handed down to us.

But there is another meaning sometimes attached to this flippant
expression, 'Muscular Christianity,' which is utterly immoral and
intolerable. There are those who say, and there have been of late
those who have written books to shew, that provided a young man is
sufficiently brave, frank, and gallant, he is more or less absolved
from the common duties of morality and self-restraint.

That physical prowess is a substitute for virtue is certainly no new