Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

souls, the blood of Christ, conveyed to him by a true repentance.

But if these things are not the matter of his care, if he only forbears his meat, and not his sin, let such an one know, that the beasts of Nineveh kept as good a fast as he.

Add to all this, that the love of sin cherished in the heart makes fasting not only an impious, but also an unseemly practice. A man's behaviour contradicts his designs: the duty does not set well upon him; it neither suits nor squares with his condition. In short, it is as improper and absurd to come to a fast with a foul heart, as to a feast with foul hands.

3dly, The third condition of a duly qualified fast is, that it be quickened and enlivened with prayer. The truth is, one of the greatest designs of this duty

to be an opportunity of prayer, which is never performed with greater fervency, activity of spirit, and restlessness of importunity, than when nature is abridged, the humours of the body low, and consequently the avocations that it suggests to the mind small and conquerable.

Prayer is a duty running through all the periods and offices of our lives, but the days of fasting are properly the time of its solemnity. They are (as I Prayer, joined

may so say) the festivals of devotion.
with fasting, is like an apple of gold set off with a
picture of silver. Now we have it at its best advan-
tage; it shines bright, and it flames pure, like fire
without the incumbrances of smoke, or the allay of
contrary blasts.

And in the management of so great a duty, to be silent and obstinate, to have no petition to prefer,

[ocr errors]

what is it but to transact the whole religion of the fast with our teeth? With a temper inferior to the ox and the brute animals, who low in their hunger, and speak aloud their wants to the hand that feeds them.

Nay, the very reason of a fast seems to require the society of prayer, for it must needs be undertook either for the procuring of some good, or the deprecation of some evil: and is there any way appointed either by God or nature, to represent the wants and grievances of our condition to heaven but by petition? by the solicitations of prayer, a duty whose strange and never-failing successes in all its holy contests with the Almighty have rendered it not only acceptable, but also invincible?

And, to add example to reason, what saint almost do we find in scripture, whose prayers did not attend their fasts? Ezra and Nehemiah, David and Daniel, took this course; and, doubtless, while David's knees were weak through fasting, as he expresses it in Psalm cix. 24, they were also employed in kneeling.

One would think, that in this performance the actings of grace might imitate the workings of nature; for is there any thing so proper to hunger as craving, or to a fast as supplication?

But where I enforce the conjunction of prayer with fasting, people must not think, that by prayer is meant a formal, customary attendance upon the offices of the church, undertook only out of a sordid fear of the eye of man, and then performed with weariness and irreverence, with seldom access, and more seldom devotion; of the duties of which persons I may say this, that if filth could be defiled,

their prayers would defile their fastings, and their fastings their prayers; so that the joining of one to the other would be nothing else, than the offering of carrion with the fumes and incense of a dung

up

hill.

4thly, The fourth condition of a truly religious fast is, that it be attended with alms and works of charity. Amongst our other emptinesses, the evacuation of the purse is proper to this solemnity; and he that inflicts a thorough penance upon this, stops the fountain of luxury, and the opportunities of extravagance.

Charity is the grand seasonage of every Christian duty it gives it a gloss in the sight of God, and a value in the sense of men; and he fasts properly, whose fast is the poor man's feast; whose abstinence is another's abundance.

In Isaiah lviii. 4, 5, 6, God roundly tells his people what was truly a fast, and what was no fast in his esteem: not to abstain from bread, but to deal it to the hungry; this is properly to fast: not to wrap ourselves in sackcloth, but to cover and clothe our naked brother; this is to be humbled.

To what purpose did the Pharisees fast twice a week, when they stayed their stomachs with devouring widows' houses? solemnizing all their humiliations with the poor man's groans and the orphan's tears? To what spiritual intent did our zealots so much exercise themselves in this duty, when, as the prophet's expression is in the same 58th chapter of Isaiah, they fasted for violence, and to fight with the fist of oppression, only that they might plunder and pillage with success; that they might make poor for

others to relieve, and so provide objects for other men's charity, instead of exercising their own?

But if the constant practice of the church may have any weight with us to determine our practice, we shall find, that works of charity were always looked upon as a proper appendage, if not also an integral part of this duty. In the same place that we read of Cornelius's fasting, we find it ushered in with its two great supporters, prayers and alms.

And the truth is, if we may compare these two together, alms have so much the preeminence above prayer, that one is a begging of God, the other is a lending to him.

I have now assigned those conditions that I think are both necessary and sufficient to render our fastings effectual to this great end of dispossessing and throwing out the evil spirit.

I confess I have not mentioned the popish austerities of whippings, pilgrimages, and going barefoot, with twenty other such tricks (for they are no better) which they prescribe and use upon these solemnities.

For if they were indeed of such sovereign force to help the soul in the practices of virtue, what is the reason that the scripture affords us not one instance of any saint that ever took this course? The Pharisees indeed disfigured and mangled themselves, and treated their bodies much after the same manner, till they made themselves more deformed in the eyes of God, than in the eyes of men.

Other examples besides these I know none; neither will reason supply the defects of tradition, or afford any solid argument to prove, that the evil

spirit may be drove out of the soul, as the moneychangers were out of the temple, with whips and scourges. The Devil does not always go, when such weapons drive.

Those, indeed, whose religion lies no deeper than their skin, may whip themselves holy, and owe their progress in virtue to the slash and the whipcord : but surely there are none, who have not enslaved their intellectuals by an implicit faith, and tamely resigned themselves first to be deceived, and then to be ruled by impostors, who do not look upon all these carnal assistances of the spirit, as no better than the mortifications of the galleys, or the devotions of the whipping-post.

III. I come now to the third and last general head, which is, to shew how this duty of fasting comes to have such a peculiar influence in dispossessing the evil spirit, and subduing our corruptions.

And here, first by way of denial, we must observe, that it does not effect this work upon the soul.

1st. Either, first, by any causal force naturally inherent in itself; for if it did, fasting would certainly and constantly have this effect upon every man that used it; the contrary of which is undeniably manifest from experience. For how many thousands, after all these abridgments, find their corruptions recoil upon them with as great a force and fury as ever, their sinful appetites being not at all abated, but rather exasperated and renewed? Which shews, that the bare performance is in itself but a weak, unactive thing, and affects nothing but in the virtue of a superior power, which sometimes cooperates with, sometimes deserts the exercise of this duty.

« AnteriorContinuar »