Taylor,
and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and
Fenelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.

If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
of the Long Parliament,--Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,--and then gather
up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.

Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
which for so many years th