responding inward humility, external severities without internal abstinence from sins of the world and of the flesh, are simple hypocrisy. They are not only useless, but fearful provocations of God. On this let so much suffice. 2. And further: what is fasting but one of the means of attaining to penitence and purity? It is not an end. In itself it is nothing. There is no fasting in heaven, no abstinence among the spirits of the just. It is only we, fallen and sullied, that need this discipline of humiliation. Fasting is a part of repentance. It not only expresses indignation at ourselves, as unworthy of God's pure creatures, but it helps to perfect our abasement. It is a part of our humiliation: a means of realising our own weakness, and of mortifying the strength and lusts of the flesh. Now all this will be plain, if we consider what holy Scripture tells us of the flesh in which we are born, and of its power against and over the spirit which dwells in us. Throughout holy Scripture we are taught that the flesh which we bear is the occasion of disobedience. I say the occasion, because it was not originally the source. The temptations of sin passed through the flesh as their avenues of approach; and sin, when committed, deposited its evil in our mortal body. Therefore the flesh in holy Scripture is spoken of as the principle of disobedience and the source of temptation. St. Paul says, "They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God."* Again: *Rom. viii. 5-8. " If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”* Again: "Make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof." "Use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh and these are contrary the one to the other so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.... The works of the flesh are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like." "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption." || St. Paul speaks of "purifying of the flesh;" St. Peter, of "putting away the filth of the flesh;" of alluring" through the lusts of the flesh;" St. John, of "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life." St. Jude, of "the garment spotted by the flesh."¶ From all these, which might easily be multiplied, it is plain there is an inclination to evil, not imaginary and metaphysical, but real and active, in the flesh of which we are born; that our state does not consist in a merely spiritual condition; that our spiritual condition is subjected, by the sin of man, to the power of another inclination or law, which dwells and works in the body of our natural flesh. In early times this truth was so deeply apprehended that some fell into the error of believing in the existence of two principles, good and evil; of which the one was in and of God, the other in and of the matter of the visible world. *Rom. viii. 13. § Ibid. 16, 17, 19–21. † Rom. xiii. 14. Gal. v. 13. Heb. ix. 13; 1 St. Peter iii. 21; 2 St. Peter ii. 18; 1 St. John ii. 16 Jude 23. They believed matter to be unmixed evil; and rather than ascribe its origin to God, they supposed it to have its origin in another being, thereby destroying the unity of God's creation, and His monarchy over all things. I note this only because we seem, in a recoil from Manichæan errors, to have gone into the opposite extreme, and to treat the flesh as if it were not the subject of evil at all; as if sin lay only in our spiritual nature, and our probation were confined to the workings of the mind. If heretics of old abhorred matter and all contact with it as evil, we have come to be incredulous of the mysterous agency of evil which is in it; and in the conduct of our personal religion exclude it from our thoughts. If this were not so, how could we be so illinclined to believe that the habit of fasting has a real and effective relation to the purifying of our souls? How could we slight it as a thing external, heterogenous, and inactive in our sanctification? Many people formally reject the practice as a whole. Others are willing to admit it so far as to be a sort of public acknowledgment of the duty of humiliation some as expressing, not as promoting, the contrition of the heart; that is, as a sign or symbol of what already exists, and is wrought by other agencies: not as a means, no less than an expression. That is to say, they treat fasting as others do the holy Sacraments, not as a means to effect an end, but as signs that the end has been already otherwise effected. This is surely a highly unscriptural view of the matter. How strained and unnatural it is to interpret St. Paul, when he says, "Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth," or "they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts," to mean, be careful to form inward habits of mental religion! And how shallow a knowledge does it imply of * Gal. v. 24. our wonderful and fearful nature: how secure and dangerous an unconsciousness of what we are! It is surely impossible for any one to reflect at all without perceiving the relation which exists between the habit of the body and the condition of the mind; between the workings of the flesh and the qualities of the soul. Besides these self-evident proofs, which the one word sensuality will suffice to show, is it not manifest that the sins of anger, pride, hardness of heart, indolence, sloth, selfishness, are so closely related to the body that it is hard to say where they chiefly dwell, whether in the spirit or in the flesh? Does not the universal language of mankind connect them together? Does not the natural instinct of discerning the characters of men by outward tokens prove to us that, whether we will or no, we do associate the bodily and mental habits of men together? Does not a free, or a soft, or excessive course of life insensibly affect the whole character? Is not the tradition of mortification as universal as that of sacrifices, pointing to a truth to be afterwards revealed in the gospel? And what do all these things prove, but that the body, or, as holy Scripture says, the flesh, is the occasion, the avenue, the provoking, aggravating, sustaining cause of moral and spiritual evil in the soul? that it kindles and keeps alive the particular affections which, when consented to by the will, become our personal and actual sins? It follows, then, at once, that an external self-discipline, such as fasting, does enter into the means of our sanctification; that as the obstructions to penitence and purity of heart arise chiefly out of sensuality, or indulgence of the affections and motions of the flesh or carnal mind, so a system which withdraws the excitements and contradicts their effects must tend to set the soul freer for its purely spiritual exercises. Let it be taken only as a removal of obstructing causes, and of intimate and subtile hindrances. This at least, upon the lowest ground, must be conceded. And yet it is hardly possible for any thoughtful person to rest satisfied with this imperfect view. The fasting of our blessed Lord was not a mere semblance; it was not an appearance, as the Docetæ believed His manhood itself to be an unreal action, for the sake of leaving an example to us. Though He was all pure, and had in Him nothing that fasting could mortify, as He had nothing on which sin could lay its hold, yet, without doubt, even in His perfect and spotless humanity, abstinence had its proper work. "Though He were a son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered ;"* by that inscrutable mystery of suffering He tasted of sorrows, which in His impassible nature He could never receive into His Person. He was weary, faint, grieved, buffeted, and put to pain, even as we are and these things on His humanity had the same effect as they have on ours. So, without doubt, in His fasting. What may have been its effects on the actings of His spotless soul in its aspect towards God, we dare not speculate; but can we doubt that the fast of forty days had its own peculiar work in that perfect sympathy towards us, by which He is able to feel with us in our natural infirmities? Was it not out of the same depth of experience that He spoke, when, as St. Mark writes, "In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples unto Him, and saith unto them, I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with Me three days, and have nothing to eat and if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way for divers of them came from far." May we not say, that He thereby made trial of such bodily infirmi Heb. v. 8, St. Mark viii. 1-3. |