of the Church to their times and to themselves. Some men cannot even say the prayers of the Church without needless and fanciful changes. This is nothing less than simple exaltation of self above the Church; and making themselves a rule for its orders and doctrines, instead of simply obeying it. Let us mortify self in all its forms; not in the grosser alone, but in those refined shapes in which it keeps its hold upon so many. How few men can endure to be put out of sight and forgotten. All that they say and do has about it something subtil and subdued, hardly perceptible, yet never unperceived, by which self again comes into view. Even in the most sacred things, and in the holiest actions, and with the precepts of self-renouncement in their mouths, there is a something, not so much as a word, but a tone, a look, an air, which expresses in full the presence and consciousness of a will not dead to its own choice. Let us seek with our whole heart the gift of holy obedience, that in all things we may submit to Christ ruling in His Church, as He submitted to St. John baptizing by the commandment of His Father. Let us, by prayer and self-chastisement, so cross and keep under our likings, preferences, views, opinions, judgments in all things, when the will of the Church is made known, that we may in all things obey "as unto the Lord and not unto

men;" with him who said: "I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me."

SERMON IV.

FASTING A MEANS TO CHRISTIAN PERFECTION.

ST. MATTHEW iv. 2.

"When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an hungered."

THE fasting of our Lord is one of those mysteries by which the Church in her solemn Litany pleads to be delivered from the power of sin. "By By Thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, good Lord, deliver us." Like the mystery of His holy Incarnation, of which it is a consequence, it must be far beyond our understanding. It seems strange that the Holy One should fast; that He who was without sin should use a sinner's discipline. We feel hardly to know what we may say of it. Thus much is certain, as the Church teaches us to say, that His forty days' fast was "for our sakes." It was for us sinners that He was incarnate and born; that He submitted to the conditions of hu

manity; that He took natural sleep and food; and so likewise that He watched and fasted.

Again it was as a part of His humiliation

for us. As He took our nature, so He put Himself in our stead. He took the condition of a sinner; He "was made under the law," as one condemned by it; was circumcised, as one that needed mortification of the flesh; was baptized with the baptism of repentance, as one that needed forgiveness; even so He fasted as one that needed the self-chastisement of a penitent. It was the humiliation of the Holy One to undergo all that is the due reward of sinners.

And again: He fasted for our imitation ; not, indeed, in the length and intensity of His miraculous abstinence, but according to the measures of our nature. His example has all the force of a command. Though there were no precept of fasting in the New Testament, yet this prominent act of our Great Master, the true pattern of a devout and holy life, would be enough. In this, likewise, it is most true that "the disciple is not above his Master, neither the servant above his Lord." We may be sure that there are virtues and an efficacy in the discipline of fasting known only to Him who "knew what is in man." It is related, in some deeper way than we understand, to the realities of our spiritual warfare, to the act

ings of our spiritual life, and to the substance of our natural being. Whether we can see all the reasons of it or no, we may rest assured that by His own example He has, in the most emphatic way, prescribed fasting to us; that no one who desires to advance in a devout life will venture to disregard the practice; and that none but they who dare to slight the example of our blessed Lord will venture to speak lightly of the duty.

I say this, because worldly, self-confident, and light-minded people, not knowing of what they speak, are wont to justify their own shallow and self-sparing religion by sinful levities on this most sacred duty. Let them beware of what they are saying. Either our Lord's life is our example, or it is not. Let them choose which they will, and abide by the consequences. To those for whom His life is no example, His death is no atonement; to those to whom His example is a law, the practice of fasting is a duty.

Fasting is the act of abstaining either wholly or in part from natural food, and that for a longer or for a shorter time, either at the precept of the Church, or by our own voluntary self-discipline. The principle on which it is founded may be stated thus that as there is a religious use of food, so there is a religious abstinence from it. To this it is commonly objected, that it is a matter wholly