is coming when our ideal of what is physically perfect--not spiritually,
for Christianity has carried us beyond anything that Greece ever
knew--will be more like the Greek in its entirety, its emphasis upon the
harmony of the whole body. The body is a mechanism to be exquisitely
cared for--self-running, it is true, and yet in need of intelligent
attention. Think of the care an engineer gives his engine, and it is by
no manner of means so wonderfully and so intricately fashioned as these
bodies of ours on which our happiness, our working ability, even our
very goodness depend. Health as a safeguard to one's whole moral being
is coming into more and more recognition, and not only as a safeguard
but also as a cultivator of all that is best in us spiritually. There
are people very ill, or permanent invalids, whose great victory it is
to be among the saints of the earth, but that it is easier to be good
when one is well no one will deny. Every big school has now its class or
classes in corrective or medical gymnastics, in which stooping
shoulders, ewe necks, curved spines, flat insteps, small waists and
narrow chests are rectified as far as possible in the limited hours of
the school days.

The time is coming when parents will consider it a disgrace to allow
their children to be physically undeveloped. The physician, always in
advance of the community for which he cares, sees how grave in moral or
intellectual import physical defects may be. The educational world,
alive to new messages for the reconstruction of its educational ideal,
begins also to place more and more emphasis upon the physical care and
development of its students--and not by any manner of means for physical
reasons only but because the whole girl or the whole boy is better
spiritually and mentally for having a body that is strong and well. The
whole being keeps better time, just as a watch does, for having clean
works. No one has the right to shut out the fresh air or the sunshine;