FASTING is a moral abstinence from food, from some religious or moral influence.
Though contrary to our tastes and habits, it is yet of the greatest antiquity.
ORIGIN.
Authors explain the matter thus:
In individual troubles, when a father, mother, or beloved child have died, all the household is in mourning. The body is washed, perfumed, enbalmed, and buried as it should be—none then think of eating, but all fast.
In public calamites, when a general drought appears, and cruel wars, or contagious maladies come, we humble ourselves before the power that sent them, and mortify ourselves by abstinence. Misfortune ceases. We become satisfied that the reason was that we fasted, and we continue to have reference to such conjectures.
Thus it is, men afflicted with public calamities or private ones, always yield to sadness, fail to take food, and in the end, make a voluntary act, a religious one.
They fancied they should macerate their body when their soul was oppressed, that they could excite the pity of the gods. This idea seized on all nations and filled them with the idea of mourning, prayers, sacrifice, abstinence, mortification, etc.
Christ came and sanctified fasting. All Christian sects since then have adopted fasting more or less, as an obligation.