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Updated: June 6, 2025
There is much ready declamation in these days against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal conversion; but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis, the fierce denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and prayerful wrestlings of the Puritan who seasoned his bread with tears and made all pleasurable sensation sin, are more in keeping with the contemplation of unending anguish as the destiny of a vast multitude whose nature we share, than the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but unshaken confidence in the reality of the bottomless pit.
That morbid and useless self-brooding would cease, and those strong cryings and wrestlings till day-break would commence, and the kingdom of heaven would suffer this violence, and the violent would take it by force. "When I kept silence; my bones waxed old, through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture was turned into the drought of summer.
With other wrestlings in spirit, far more eager and real than these mere fancies derived from myths, it is not within the province of the present writer to deal; they are not for the house-tops or the market-places.
What need of allusion to events which changed the world which every child has learned to the war of Titans, uprooting of hoary trees and rock-ribbed hills, to the Worms diet, Peasant wars, the Patmos of Eisenach, and huge wrestlings with the Devil? Imperial edicts are soon employed to suppress the Reformation in the Netherlands by force.
For in wrestlings thou art following the footsteps of thy uncles, and shamest neither Theognetos at Olympia, nor the victory that at Isthmos was won by Kleitomachos' stalwart limbs.
She arose, composed the form of her sister, and turned and laid her hand upon the shoulder of Herman, saying calmly: "It is all over. Go, young gentleman, and wrestle with your sorrow and your remorse, as you may. Such wrestlings will be the only punishment your rashness will receive in this world! Be free of dread from me.
On which accounts, the Presbytery testify against said union, as being inconsistent with faithfulness in the cause of Christ; and against said abstract, as, however containing a variety of particulars very just and good, yet bearing no positive adherence to, nor particular mention of, faithful wrestlings and testimonies of the martyrs and witnesses for Scotland's covenanted cause.
It was the anniversary of their marriage, and, so far, Jim had won, with what fightings and strugglings and wrestlings of the spirit only Sally and himself knew.
Knowing full well that of every earnest soul and honest, profound thinker these ontologic questions would sooner or later demand audience, he wisely placed her in the philosophic palaestra, encouraged her wrestlings, cheered her on, handed her from time to time the instruments and aids she needed, and then, when satisfied that the intellectual gymnastics had properly trained and developed her, he invited her where he felt assured the spirit of the age would inevitably drive her to the great Pythian games of speculation, where the lordly intellects of the nineteenth century gather to test their ratiocinative skill, and bear off the crown of bay on the point of a syllogism or the wings of an audacious hypothesis.
The floors of the house shook to tramplings, rushes, wrestlings, falls and collisions. The walls resounded to chorused bellowings and roars.
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