Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 1.djvu/154

 and duty of fasting, whatever he may understand by the term. "The bridegroom is taken away from us, and so we must fast in these days:" our Blessed has given us instructions how we ought to fast, and therefore implied that His disciples would fast: the Apostles were "in fastings often:" in fastings, as well as in sufferings for the Gospel, or by pureness, by knowledge, by all the graces which the  imparted, they approved themselves the Ministers of. "Our and ," says Hooker, "would not teach the manner of doing, much less propose a reward for doing that which were not both holy and acceptable in  sight." And yet, after all the allowances which can be made for that fasting, which is known to our only who seeth in secret, one cannot conceal from one's self that this duty is in these days very inadequately practised. It is, in fact, a truth almost proverbial, that a duty which may be performed at any time, is in great risk of being neglected at all times. The early Christians felt this, and appointed the days of our Blessed crucifixion and murder, the Wednesday and Friday of each week, to be days of fasting and especial humiliation. Those days, in which especially the bridegroom was taken away, the days, namely, in which He was crucified and lay in the grave, were besides early consecrated as Fasts by the widowed Church. Nor was it because they were in perils, which we are spared; because they were in deaths oft, that they practised or needed this discipline. Quite the reverse. Their whole life was a Fast, a death to this world, a realizing of things invisible. It was when dangers began to mitigate, when Christianity became, (as far as the world was concerned,) an easy profession, it was then that the peril increased, lest their first simplicity should be corrupted, their first love grow cold! Then those who had spiritual authority in the Church increased the stated Fasts, in order to recal that holy earnestness of life, which the recentness of their redemption, and the constant sense of their presence, had before inspired. Fasts were not merely the voluntary