hard experiences, will surely degrade the old Hebrew's conception of that Being in whom were the foundations of truth, into the image of one whose imbecile sense of justice has not nerve enough to leave incorrigible sinners in the hands of his own divine laws. He comes to be a God of such boundless goodnature, that he can only fold rebellious creatures in the arms of mercy, though they smite him unrelentingly in the face.

Different is the idea of God impressed on the mind when the army of Cromwell, gathered in their tents at the morning drumbeat, reading from the opened Bible of him who allots the destinies of nations, lifting their hands in prayer to the Ruler of battles, and pouring out their hearts in one of the grand old doxologies of a militant church; are up there, at the trumpet's call, to write in blood the name of Marston Moor on the conscience of England forever. So was it when Joshua led the hosts of Israel seven times around the walls of Jericho. So was it, when Miriam danced the triumph of the Lord on the shores of the Red Sea. The desolating tread of armies, marching in the cause of right and conscience, leaving homes laid in ashes, hearts broken, mangled dead, moans of dying, groaning hospitals, all a sacrifice which the Sovereign of nations uses as a last means for lifting human nature into a capability of life with him, is forcing the truth, even upon thoughtless minds, that fearful must be the infinite distance which lies between man and such a Sovereign. For even these are required to shock humanity out of its selfishness; to make it capable of heavenly fellowship; to impress it with the awful character of God.

Yet all such achievements of Christianity through her principles harnessed to the passions of men, are only strides towards a finishing work. Coming into the world and finding the spirit of strife restless on the earth, she proposes the divine task of entering into that strife, of kindling it into a fiercer flame, and of feeding the fire with her own truth, until human passions have burned themselves pure of the mean and selfish and dishonorable. The principles of the gospel entering as the inspiring element into the clash of war, it has become true,

"That God's most dreaded instrument,

In working out a pure intent,

Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter."

But the thought which Wordsworth does not mention as marking a divine genius in the method, is that Christianity using this terrible instrument to work out the noble purposes of God, will so destroy the instrument finally and forever. The end proposed is indeed far off. The process is hard and slow; for the slow and the hard are God's method. The steps which he has trod in the redemption of man, have been, scarcely one of them, taken except along a terrible way. Human kind, in the estimation of divine wisdom, is too far gone in wickedness to be saved by gentle means. Some diseases that prey upon the mortal life of man, can be arrested only by the severe appliances of medical science; bread poultices will not cure the bite of the cobra da capello. And so the Holy Spirit uses the surgery of divine science in saving human kind. Doctrines are announced to men, about which earthly passions gathering, and surging round and round in an increasing tumult, raise at last a storm that shakes all the elements of earth. Yet that storm carries salvation even in its ruin. It shocks into life a new conscience in men. Baptized with suffering and blood, this new conscience comes up slowly to sit in judgment on the conduct of kings and powers that study the art of making war. As Christian England may be supposed, by a fiction of faith, not to dare the opening of an unrighteous war, so the time will be, perhaps at a starry distance, when no Christian people will venture that which would bring down upon their selfishness, as if it were infernal, the execration of the conscience of a world. In the mean time a public sentiment, still rising purer through baptisms of fire, will be piercing with a keener search the actions of each Christian nation, as its policy of honor or of pride or of glory is unfolded to the judgment of all other nations. And, farther on in the work of redeeming man, when bloodshed has written all its terrific lessons of the majesty of truth, of the dignity of honor, of the sacredness of invisible principles, on the heart and conscience so as never to be forgotten, and the religion of Jesus, working through these, has changed the nature of man, then war and strife, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. A millennium of years may span the distance which lies between that time and ours; yet in the

sure wisdom of God, whose purposes unfold on the patient roll of centuries, all nations, ransomed of the Lord, shall come to Zion with songs of peace, and its everlasting joy upon their heads.

ARTICLE IV.

FASTING.

NOBODY ever objects to fasting as a secular abstinence from food, for good reasons, unconnected with religion. If it will promote health, facilitate business, give lightness, freedom, vigor and rapidity to the intellectual operations, assist the orator to think well on his feet, or even aid the facile and animated delivery of a written address of any kind, it is conceded to be a good thing. The lawyer who has an argument to make in an important case, the merchant or banker who has complicated accounts to explore, the book-keeper casting figures, the political partisan who is reciting a stump speech in a circle of towns and counties before a great election, the lecturer who is earning his seventy-five, or hundred or hundred and fifty dollars per night, before popular audiences, does well to regard a fitting condition of body and brain. If one is travelling, fasting to gain time is approved. For reasons like these even a Christian may fast, it being understood he does not do it for religion! Nature has inserted a nightly fast between the last meal of each day and the first of the next, which is therefore called breakfast. After the effect of the food taken at supper has ceased in the system, we should always be annoyed with returning hunger, if the body were not receiving another sort of refreshment through sleep. Watchers by sick-beds and travellers upon railroads by night are aware of this, and "break" their "fast" before the hour of the morning meal. The unlearned in physiology think of some connection between this natural fast after midnight and the sleep which Nature gives us towards the small hours. It is only a religious fast of such duration in waking hours, for the repose or health of the soul which would be

objected to. Even a Christian minister is thought wise to fast sufficiently on the Sabbath to preach well; only if he should do the same to pray to purpose, or for any other help to his Christian experience, any day, he might be thought superstitious! and prone to forget that "every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving!"

The physical advantages of occasional fasting, in all climates, are conceded by all writers, except certain writers on religion, and by these in cases where the end is merely physical. "Abstinence from food in eastern climes," says one of these, "is more easy and less detrimental (if not in some cases positively useful) than keeping from food would be for us in these cold, damp northern regions." But Michalis, who was by no means an Oriental, says that "alternation is the grand maxim of dietetics," a maxim which he applies to labor and recreation, but which applies to feeding and fasting as well. And a New England divine, still less an Oriental, and more evangelical than either, said the other day: "I believe it would do us Americans a great deal of good, both as Christians and as men, if we had a set of Sabbaths given for the stomach, and the more so now that the poor fagged organ has more hard work to do on our Sundays than at any other time. Besides, Nature has a way of getting her digestion-Sabbaths without consent of anybody; appointing every little while her day of headache, or cold, or colic, and so having gotten her rest by a kind of armed cessation, she lets us go on our way, a little more chastised, and probably a great deal less recruited than we should have been by a rational fasting." Even a Pharisee might practice such fasting and not be "practising a folly."

The Patriarchs before Moses' day seem not to have been aware of the physical uses of fasting, though Orientals. It makes its first appearance in the Bible as a purely religious thing.

Rising out of this natural view of the subject, there are also moral advantages from fasting to which no very strenuous objection will be made. Andrew Steinmetz says, in his "Personal Narrative of a Year among the English Jesuits," (The Novitiate," p. 212, note,) "Food is the main stimulant of the system; hence its withdrawal is beneficial in all acute diseases.

The passions may be termed acute diseases of the brain, when they riot in excess; consequently fasting operates on the passions by the physical medium. Apoplexy, morbid affections of the stomach, derangements of the liver, many diseases of the heart, may be averted or subdued by well-directed fasting. Now many of the mind's diseases are sympathetically deduced from the morbid state of the respective organs diseased in the fore-mentioned cases. Thus the efficacy of fasting is manifest.” As far as this on the score of what the "moral constitution" requires doubtless some would go in favor of fasting, who would draw back at once if it be suggested that any spiritual benefit is to be found in this form of keeping under the body and bringing it into subjection.

The objections made to fasting as a Christian practice, are, therefore, in their character and source, suspicious. They are of a self-indulgent and worldly cast. They are of the earth, earthy. They come from the carnal mind. They originate abundantly with those who are lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. They violate all analogy, and in so doing, betray a cause and motive unspiritual. Why should that abstinence from fulness of food, which makes the reasoning powers acute, the fancy nimble, the wit quick and airy, the perceptions bright and strong; which even redeems the moral powers from a gross and burdensome subjection to lower elements in us, utterly fail to be of service to the spiritual nature? Or if it is of still higher service in religion than it is in health, mental work, and moral exercises, why should any object to it? Why should we not expect to see a place for it in Christianity?

If religious fasting, then, is not explicitly and expressly prohibited in the New Testament, no one has any right to discountenance it as a proper Christian regimen. Worldly men who think more of their regular meals than of greater and spiritual objects may, indeed, do so. But who beside? If one is simply physically incapable of observing a religious fast, that is a sufficient reason for not doing so; and such an one, in a sincere state of mind, will not argue against it on other grounds, unless mistaught. If there be spiritual profit, as the analogy of physical, intellectual, and moral profit from fasting argues, he will simply be sorry for being disabled therefrom. Still,