much pain and fatigue they go through to get themselves into perfect
training for a race. How much more trouble ought we to take to make
ourselves fit to do God's work? For these foot-racers do all this
only to gain a garland which will wither in a week; but we, to gain a
garland which will never fade away; a garland of holiness, and
righteousness, and purity, and the likeness of Jesus Christ."

The next example of abstinence which St. Paul takes, is from the
prize-fighters, who were very numerous and very famous, in the
country in which the Corinthians lived. "I fight," he says, "not
like one who beats the air;" that is, not like a man who is only
brandishing his hands and sparring in jest, but like a man who knows
that he has a fight to fight in hard earnest; a terrible lifelong
fight against sin, the world, and the devil; "and, therefore," he
says, "I do as these fighters do." They, poor savage and brutal
heathens as they are, go through a long and painful training. Their
very practice is not play; it is grim earnest. They stand up to
strike, and be struck, and are bruised and disfigured as a matter of
course, in order that they may learn not to flinch from pain, or lose
their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight. "And so do
I," says St. Paul; "they, poor men, submit to painful and
disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry battles. I
submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make me brave in the
great battle which I have to fight against sin, and ignorance, and
heathendom." "Therefore," he says, in another place, "I take
pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions, in necessities, in
distresses;" and that not because those things were pleasant, they
were just as unpleasant to him as to anyone else; but because they
taught him to bear, taught him to be brave; taught him, in short, to
become a perfect man of God.