the day immediately preceding the great day of atonement. "On the tenth day of the seventh month ye shall afflict your souls" (Lev. xvi. 29). Where sorrow for sin is sincere and deep, fasting is natural. The edge of appetite is blunted, and the man of penitence forgets to eat his bread. It is only when prolonged beyond this, into the artificial, that it becomes a snare, an hypocrisy, swelling into a fierce fanaticism, throwing back on God his gifts as so many enemies in disguise. In the struggle with nature the temper grows irritable. The neglected body becomes a fiend, turns on its ill-used companion, no longer a helpmeet but a hindrance to each other. In the struggle, Christianity and civilization have often parted company. The maxim "that cleanliness is next to godliness" is trodden under foot as a godless maxim. * This body, "so wonderfully and curiously made," becomes a stranger to the ordinary decencies of life; that "the saint" that inhabits it may die in what is called "the odour of sanctity."

Though there was only one fast-day of divine appointment in the Old Testament Church, the worthies of that Church did not limit themselves to one. The Psalmist speaks of "chastening his chastening his soul with fasting" (Ps. xxxv. 13, and Ps. Ixix. 10), words which seem to imply continuous or reiterated fastings. Daniel sought an answer to bis prayers not only by supplications but fastings (Dan. ix. 3). It is recorded of Anna, the prophetess, that she "waited on God with fasting and prayer night and day." The repentance of Nineveh at Jonah's preaching was accompanied with fastings, extending even to the cattle, and the anger of the Lord was turned away from that city. We find this fasting associated in Old Testament history with times and occasions of unusual earnestness in prayer, and especially with confession and humiliation on account of sins. Among the Jews there was also an order of men, called Nazarites, distinguished by ascetic practices; at least by abstinence from all strong drink and other acts of self-denial, of life-long continuance. To this order belonged Samson, Elijah, and Elisha, and the forerunner of our Lord. In the

Our vile body," is our version of St. Paul (Phil. iii. 21, but in the original it is "body of our humiliation." The apostle is comparing it with the glorified body.

time of our Lord fasting was so much one of the distinctive marks of the professedly devout, that he represents the Pharisee as telling God in his prayers, "I fast twice in the week," not tasting food until sunset, which was reckoned a day of fasting. This was a Pharisaic addition to the Mosaic Law on Mondays, in honour, they said, of Moses going up to Sinai; on Thursdays, in honour of his coming down ;-one proof amongst many of the tendency of the Jews, after their return from the Captivity, to develop for themselves a religion of outward observances of which Moses knew nothing. The schools of the prophets seemed to have something ascetic in their mode of life. They owed their institution to the extraordinary circumstances of the Jewish Church, when the great ends of divine providence in the separation of the Jews from all nations were in danger.

In the time of our Lord the Essenes seem to have been the only ascetics. It is remarkable that they are not once mentioned in the New Testament. Our knowledge of them is from Josephus, from whose account we learn that they lived in solitudes and in celibacy—not as hermits, but in monastic societies. Satisfied with the perfection of their religious life, they seem to have lent a deaf ear to the gospel.

How does our Lord regard ascetic practices? We read in the gospels, that, after his baptism, he was carried into the wilderness to be tempted of Satan, and when there, "fasted forty days and nights." In this great fast, the Church of Rome and the Eastern Churches have found an example, the imitation of which constitutes the Fast of Lent, during which the more devout rival each other in their near approach to perfection; and not a few are reputed to have received, throughout the forty days and nights, only a little water to moisten their parched lips.

The Churches of the Reformation have not so interpreted the incident in our Lord's history. The forty days' fast was part of his great humiliation and sufferings, reaching from his birth in Bethlehem until he expired on the cross; no more to be imitated than his crucifixion. a fast being physically impossible, all imitations of it can only be a pretence and hypocrisy. It was done once for all, never to be repeated-to

Such

form with his life and death the one, whole, and perfect sacrifice and atonement for sin. As we cannot take from the perfection of his great atonement, so neither can we add to that which the Father has accepted and the Son offered. In this it is our part not to imitate but to believe and adore.

Any imitation of this fast, whether in the letter or spirit, whether for the forty days or one day, is not so much as named. Such an imitation would have been regarded by a Paul as a returning again to bondage; and in the eye of common sense would have been sacrificing the spirit to the letter. This is the only fast recorded in the life of our Lord; his usual way of life was natural, genial, and social, a contrast to that of the Nazarites, or the old prophets, or to that of his forerunner. He ate and drank and clothed himself like other men; accepted their invitations; so much so, as to awaken the reproaches of his enemies, who contrasted his way with that of John. He seems to have quite shocked their traditional ideas of a prophet, and for his freedom they called him a "glutton and a winebibber;" while John, for his austerity, was said "to have a devil." Our Lord does not deny the difference between John's way of life and his own, neither does he condemn John's way, though so different from With that large-hearted wisdom and charity that we so seldom imitate in our judgments of one another, his reply was, "Wisdom is justified of her children;" that is, John's way was suited to John's character and work, and so was his to the work and character of the Messiah: wise men will understand the difference and appreciate it. Being asked why his disciples did not fast as John's did, he replies, with a touching reference to the life of hardships and suffering to which they should one day be subjected as his missionaries to the world, "Can ye make the children of the bride-chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? While he is with them, fasting is as unsuitable as at a marriage feast: a reply without one drop of austerity. He adds a proverb about the danger of putting new wine into old bottles, as if the time would come when a self-denial would be required sufficient to try not only the ascetic but the martyr. Of natural fasting, such as arises from a spirit pre-occupied,

his own.

we see many evidences in the life of our Lord. "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." In such a life acts of self-denial are natural; but not in the way of vows and stated days, but in the way "of forgetting to eat his bread;" as when he told his disciples at the well of Samaria, when they pressed food upon him, that he "had meat to eat that they knew not of." But when he fasted, it was not to grieve and to afflict his soul, but from grief and from affliction for others. Except in this way, we never see our Lord fasting or prescribing fasts to others. He is temperate, but never austere; patient, never stoical, never unsympathising with the every-day avocations and enjoyments of life. Instead of teaching us, like John, to live on the minimum of human subsistence, as if with Christ this was religious perfection, by his presence at the marriage feast at Cana, and by his first miracle there, he has taught all his followers to rejoice with those that rejoice, as well as to weep with those that weep. Our Lord's allusions to fasting are not unlike those of the prophet Isaiah and the later Jewish prophets, who speak of fastings as if, in their day, there was no want of such observances, and they looked for something more spiritual than mere bodily services could awaken or promote.

*

It is true that in giving directions for the expulsion of certain kinds of devils our Lord says, "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting" (Mark ix. 29). If any one should infer from this saying that prayer may attain to deeper earnestness by fasting, the inference is not unnatural; but a fasting, very different from periodical fasts, imposed alike on all and in all circumstances. With this exception the life and teaching of our Lord is silent as to fasts, as if to teach us a way of serving God with the heart, in the cheerful and temperate use of all his gifts.

Are the apostles more outspoken on this subject? They were Jews, and naturally attached to those practices in use by the devout men of their times and country. When they commence any important work, we find them joining fasting with prayer (Acts xiii. 3). When Paul and Barnabas are set apart to their mission to the Gentiles, it is by "prayer and fasting" (1 Cor.

As in Matt. vi. 16" When ye fast, be not as the hypocrites. "

vii. 5). The elders of the Church are ordained "by prayer and fasting;" and the apostle Paul assumes that private Christians may have seasons for giving themselves to fasting and prayer: but what they do is this, they never prescribe it to the Gentiles, or to Christians at large, as an essential part of Christian worship.* Prayer is a duty and a privilege, to which they call all Christians. Fasting they enjoin on none; no, not even the one day fast in the year of the Jewish Church, which Paul seems to have continued to observe for himself. Their own observance of these things is noticed in passing, just as their own observation of the Jewish passover, which they yet taught was fulfilled in Christ. Partly from custom, partly for peace, they still so far conform to Judaism-yet leave the Gentile Christians free, nay, anxiously vindicate their freedom. Paul even takes on himself some of the vows of a Nazarite for a time (Acts xviii. 18); yet he never calls on the Gentile Christians to practise such austerities as shaving the head or making vows. It is good "always to pray and not to faint;" but fasting is good only for some, and not even for those at all times. To fast is one thing in winter, and another in the heat of summer; one thing to an inhabitant of the East, and another to an inhabitant of the north of Europe; one thing in weak, and another in strong health; one thing in manhood, and another in age ;-but the gospel is for all time, and for every clime, and is distinguished from all other religions by its broad human character. The Koran of Mahomet enjoins all the faithful in the month of Ramadan to fast until sunset, not knowing that there are inhabited regions where, for many days, the sun does not set. The Church of Rome in the rubric of its Missal betrays that it is not the Church of the world, by enacting, That the sacrament is void unless the wine be of the grape, and the bread of wheat, both products belonging to certain zones; and the bread of Judea in our Lord's time was much more likely to have been rye

The fasting of the apostles was not for our example. This appears from their never exhorting Christian converts, Jewish or Gentile, to fasting. They themselves fasted, just as they observed other Jewish practices, which they continued through their lives, and which gradually fell into disuse as Jewish influence diminished in the Gentile churches, and especially after Jerusalem was destroyed.

the unleavened bread of the passover, of which the disciples had just partaken.

This silence of our Lord and his apostles surely signifies that ascetic practices are not the essentials of Christian life. In these things we are free. If any man, from experience, finds that occasional fasting promotes devout feelings and strengthens self-control, to him fasting may be a duty; but if experience has taught him that it only weakens and irritates, let him rather hear the voice of Paul to the jailer of Philippi, "Do thyself no harm!" The religion of the ascetic is a wretched substitute for the grace of God in Jesus Christ; and atonement by penances for the atonement made "once for all" by the God-man: "Which things have a show of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body."* Wesley began his religious life with strong ascetic tendencies: at one time leaving off meat and wine, and living on bread only; at another, sleeping on the floor instead of using a bed. These practices he abandoned as his real life-work opened before him; when he saw how much more the grace of God uses the word read, taught, and preached to bless and save men's souls, than all rites and ceremonies and selfmortifications. Serve God and be cheerful! was his latest gospel. An empty stomach, he found, only filled the brain with maggots and spoiled the temper.

The Scottish, like the English reformers, brought out of Rome some remnants of its asceticism; but their inconsistence with the doctrines of grace was gradually seen and felt. The only prescribed fast in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was in preparation for the communion, in imitation, probably, of the Jewish fast before the day of atonement; but even this has dropped aside, and the name of the "Fast Day" alone remains. Periodical fasting, like the periodical bleedings of our ancestors, has almost ceased in Protestant churches, wherever the gospel, in its fulness of grace and truth, is preached. Cheerfully to partake, and temperately to use, ail God's gifts is felt to be a natural, piety,

natural especially in those that have opened their souls to the good news of salvation by grace. As we love to see our invited guests joyfully partaking of what we have provided for them, so the great Giver, both of spiritual and temporal blessings, loves to see all his guests enjoy the good things on his table.

In contrast with this silence, the Church of Rome has developed ascetic practices to the limits and beyond of human endurance, and delights to tell of the supernatural fasts of her saints. They have developed by self-denial a double religion-one for ordinary Christians, and another for those whom they call the "religious;" and the name religious has been altered-shall we not say, degraded-like the word "saint," or the word "ecclesiastical," which has come to signify not anything spiritual, but mere outward rites and ceremonies, or a pretentious will-worship.* The priest of Rome must go to perform mass fasting, although we read of Christ and his disciples, "that whilst they were eating" Jesus took bread and instituted the sacrament. The religious of Rome all imitate the forty days' fast in Lent. They might as well imitate the crucifixion, as indeed some have carried so far their asceticism, and gone near both to starvation and crucifixion. How melancholy to find such a man as Pascal, whilst magnifying the doctrines of grace in his writings, utterly unable to take the use of them in his own life, and tormenting himself to death by fasts, and the wearing of girdles with iron prongs. Kinglake in his "Eothen " says "that fasts in the Greek Church produce a febrile and irritable influence, depressing the spirits, and leading some to suicide. At the season of fasting dark crimes increase during Lent." Southey tells us that no season was so dreaded by him when a boy, and by the servants of his maiden aunt with whom he then lived, as her periodical fasts, in obedience to the Church of England rubrics. Instead of anointing her

"There is no phase," says a living writer on European morals, 66 in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than the ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his brain, become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato. St. Jerome records their deeds with a thrill of admiration."-Lecky's European Morals, vol. ii., p. 114.

face, as our Saviour directs the Pharisees, she looked miserable, and made all around miserable by the indulgence of the irritability fasting so often produces.

All artificial fasts tend to dishonour the great atonement, as if something of our sufferings must be added thereto. They open the door to hypocrisy and fanaticism, or that curious mixture of the two which we observe in "the religious" that have reached the highest reputation. This silence and the experience of the past has taught us, that asceticism is no part of the Christianity of the New Testament, which is designed for all the world and for all time. Like any other bodily pain, fasting is to be avoided, or, as an evil, only used to obtain some overbalancing good. To go beyond this is to tempt God-lay a snare for ourselves, and is contrary to the spirit of the Sixth Commandement, which requires us to do, and forbids us to leave undone, anything needful to the preservation of our own life and health, or that of others. The Apostle Paul warns the Christians of Colosse of the rise of ascetic religion as only having "a show of wisdom." In these things, says the apostle, "let no man beguile you."

VOLUNTARY POVERTY, along with Celibacy, became the favourite form of that life which, in the Middle Ages, was honoured with the name of "religious." The cause of Christ was worthy of any sacrifice, whether to the loss of goods or of life. But the Christian must consider whether he can do more good by one sacrifice of all he possesses than by many sacrifices diffused over his life. There are great occasions in the history of the world when the greatest good can be done by the greatest sacrifice, and that once for all; as when the man gives himself and all he has. The believer may then hear the apostle saying, "Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, when he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might be rich." But he will do so, on deliberation, and in the full view of the sacrifice he is making, and of the blessings of this life that God had bestowed upon him. The man that renounces his property, like the man that renounces life, without an adequate cause, is guilty of a species of suicide. He cuts down his fruit tree, instead

of distributing yearly its fruits; and parts with his fountain, instead of bountifully distributing its streams.

In the thirteenth century, St. Francis of Assisi, then a young man, just come to his patrimony, sold his inheritance, and went forth a barefooted begging friar. Thousands followed his example, and voluntary poverty became the fashion and passion of the religious, until the riches of the monastic orders became their ruin, and revealed the folly of all attempts to thwart the first principles and sentiment of society-the love of property. In the eighteenth century, Whitefield records in his Journal that one was put in Bedlam for doing what St. Francis did, selling his clothes and giving the money to the poor. Whitefield's own life was a noble example of a self-sacrifice diffused over all his life, wisely and well done, for the glory of his Divine Master -a sacrifice of love to Christ and to souls; and Wesley, who began his religious life with ascetic practices and self-inflictions that neither benefited soul nor body, lived to offer a long and entire life of sacrifice and love to his God and Saviour.

Let us contrast the small scope given to ascetic and monastic religion in the Jewish, and the still smaller in the New Testament Church, with the enormous and grotesque developments in the Eastern and Western Churches after the third century, and the revival of the same kind of religionism in our own day. We see in this New Testament silence an anticipation of those tendencies and their rebuke. If this reserve has any meaning, it is to stint and limit these practices to the smallest possible limits. This silence at the least declares, that such practices belong not to the essence of Christianity, are in no way necessary to develop the Christian man or the Christian society; that the highest style of both

may be attained without them. Finding so little in the New Testament about asceticism, and nothing at all about the monastic and the celibate life, surely we may go yet further, and say, these are the excrescences and wild-growths of a zeal without knowledge, and of times when men were tempted by their fears to desert their duties, and to give their desertion consecrated names.

In a healthier Christian state, where men added to their faith, not only patience, but fortitude,

these excrescences would have been treated as we do warts upon the human countenance, which we seek to reduce to the smallest possible dimensions, until they disappear altogether, knowing that if permitted to grow, it would be at the expense of the general health, vigour, and beauty. In the decline of the Roman Empire, even whilst, in some cases, society was compensated by the preservation of letters, it was weakened still more by withdrawing from active life the best citizens, parents, husbands, and wives; substituting retreats from the world to those that should have been the centres of influence and the guides of their several neighbourhoods, who, if, in imitation of our Saviour, they had lived in their appointed place, and done their appointed work, had put new life into their fellows to defend what remained and recover what was lost. Instead, Christians were led to cultivate only the passive virtues, and to seek their own security and peace, and at last to become a common prey to the common enemy of Christianity and civilization. Nowhere did this ascetic life so develop itself as in the Byzantine Empire, that covered Mount Athos with its hundred monasteries! and nowhere did Christianity become more corrupt, and was more rapidly prepared to become a prey to the Saracen and the Turk. To this day the Greek Church, amidst its multiplied monastic developments, has done little to elevate the populations that inhabit some of the fairest regions of the world.

Nowhere in Europe have asceticism and monastic life been so largely developed as in Spain and Italy, arresting their progress among European nations, emasculating these once noble and energetic nations, turning their religion into superstition and fanaticism, their industry and enterprise into indolence and apathy. With the very

smallest amount of ascetic and monastic religiousness, Great Britain and the nations that have sprung from her have developed Christianity and civilization hand in hand, and are now foremost in the modern world in every enterprise that is fitted to elevate and purify modern life. Before the Reformation, when asceticism had its witnesses in almost every valley, Scotland was the poorest and rudest of European nations. To know what it has become since, Lord Macaulay recommends