and certain: "Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in Heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother." Observe, this promise is not to a few favoured ones, but to all who will do His will, quietly, each one in his own place. There is not one here, nor in any other Christian congregation, to whom this hope is not held out, that he may be accounted the brother or sister, or mother of Christ. Blessed hope! God grant that we may none of us wilfully throw it away.

f S. Matt. xii. 50.

SERMON XLI.

OUR LORD'S OWN ACCOUNT OF CHRISTIAN

FASTING.

S. LUKE V. 35.

"The days will come, when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from them; and then shall they fast, in those days."

"By Thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, Good Lord deliver us." How, we may reverently ask, by His Fasting? even as by His Baptism and Temptation. It was part (if one may so speak) of the process whereby He made Himself entirely one with us; going before us, doing what He would have us do, and suffering what we justly deserved to suffer. And this, not merely as our example, but as our Head and Surety. He was baptized with water and the Holy Ghost, not that He needed the mystical washing away of sin, or that He was not from His Incarnation "anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows," but that the washing and anointing might overflow, as "from Aaron's head to the skirts of his clothing," might overflow and be communicated to each one of us, His members. He was tempted of Satan, not that such probation and exercise was His a Preached at Penzance on Ash-wednesday, 1863.

appointed way, as it is ours, to moral perfection, but that He might mysteriously sympathize with and succour us when we are tempted.

In like manner, our Divine Lord fasted, not that His Flesh required, as ours, so to be subdued to the spirit; God forbid! but as the Head and Leader of His people, to sanctify and bless their fasts; to shew them how to fast; to expiate, as it were, by His sacred hunger all the sins of our eating and drinking, our intemperance when we have enough, and our impatience when we are in want. Such, we may humbly believe, were some of the purposes of our Incarnate God's mysterious and miraculous Fasting in the wilderness, besides any other influences, secret to us, which so wonderful a transaction may have had on the worlds visible and invisible.

Now in this, as in other manifestations of His Sacred Humanity, the Spouse from the beginning was taught by the Holy Ghost to enter into the mind of the Bridegroom. Few, if any, pages of the Prayer-book come to us with greater authority of God's Word, than that which we turn over to-day: nor is any season in the Christian calendar more distinctly sanctioned in the Bible than Lent. The Law and the Prophets forecast it by unmistakeable types in the persons of Moses and Elijah; Moses, by his twice-told forty days, teaching the double use of religious abstinence; to prepare the flesh and spirit for holy communications, and to do penance, and obtain grace in aid of the penitent; Elijah, by his retirement for the like space of time, instructing the Church how to chasten herself, and cry mightily unto God in time of decay and rebuke and blasphemy.

To God's ancient Israel, fallen as it was, the lesson was repeated in the time of Joel, and it is taught us year by year, as on this day. And lest men should imagine that all this is legal and outward, and not in harmony with the spiritual service of the Gospel, our Master and Lord has spoken so plainly that we cannot choose but hear, in that Sermon which He preached to us all to be the alphabet of our Christian duty. "When ye give alms, when ye pray, when ye fast, do so and so." Whatever difference the

customs of men may have made, no one surely can be so shameless as to doubt or deny that our Lord here takes it for granted that His faithful people will, in some way, fast; that it will be a matter of course with them, as much so as that they will pray and give alms. Is this, think you, duly considered by the majority of even well-meaning Christians in our land? Is there not some danger, that, in our great care not to appear to men to fast, we may be found, in the end, to have gone without fasting at all? And if He is to be taken at His own word, will not that be the same kind of loss as if a man should live and die without almsgiving or without prayer?

Over and above all this, the Church from very ancient times has found special warrant for keeping her Lents, in those remarkable words of our Lord which, literally taken, seem to fix a particular time when His disciples should fast. "Days will come, when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast." If you consider for a moment the circumstances under which He was speaking, you will find, I think, that the saying has

three distinct bearings: that it is at once a prophecy, a ritual precept, and a principle of Christian morality. To explain its force as a prophecy; observe that it arose from a discussion between certain Pharisees on the one hand, and on the other certain disciples of S. John Baptist, "about purifying." S. John being now in prison, the transition from his ministry to our Lord's was becoming more and more evident; his disciples were more and more attracted to Christ, according to the tenor of the parable which John himself had addressed to them, by way of farewell, as it would seem, shortly before he was cast into prison. "He must increase, but I must decrease, He that hath the Bride is the Bridegroom: but the friend of the Bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the Bridegroom's voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled." When, in obedience to John, they had regularly resorted to our Lord, still questions would naturally arise, as before, "about purifying;" i. e., I suppose, how a sinner can be made clean before God. Such a dispute occurred about fasting. The Pharisees and S. John's disciples were at a certain time solemnizing a fast. It must of course have been a voluntary fast, not one of those ordained by the law of Moses, or kept by any sufficient authority of the Jewish Church; otherwise our Lord's own disciples would have joined in it, for they were taught by Him to "walk orderly and keep the law." But in this case, they did not join in the fast. This seems to have occurred more than once, and so John's disciples, being rather disturbed, naturally put the question to our Lord, Why b S. John iii. 29, 30.