Here, under the head of fasting, we may notice again—what applies equally to prayer or almsgiving—that our Lord is passing no slight on “common” or public religious actions. St. Paul tells us (1 Cor. xvi. 2) that we are to have church collections; and our Lord (St. Matt. xviii. 19–20) tells us we are to pray together; and He instituted the Eucharist, which is the Church’s chief social or public act of communion with God and mutual fellowship. So that it is ridiculous to suppose that our Lord is here slighting social religious acts—acts which are performed by the Church as a body, and in the performance of which we have the encouragement which comes of co-operation and the sense ofresponsibility to the community as well as to God. And most of all it is ridiculous to suppose that our Lord is discouraging common fasts, but not common prayer or almsgiving. In no case is our Lord undervaluing the common religious acts. But He is indicating the new motive of religious action, whether it be prayer or almsgiving or fasting. Its motive is to be God, and not man.
Once more, our Lord is not here saying anything against the manifestation of our religion by outward acts. We cannot pray properly—speaking generally—without adopting a fit attitude in prayer, that is on the regular occasions of public and private prayer. We should pray in an attitude which befits our relation to God, on our knees, humbly, devoutly, because we are creatures of soul and body, and we cannot express the religious feeling of the soul properly without its influencing the gesture of the body also. We are made up of soul and body, and a “spiritual” act of worship is one in which the spirit, that is the will, heart, and intelligence is engaged; not one in which the body takes no part. Then if we learn to pray aright, kneeling upon our knees,we can carry the habit of prayer into our common life. In the same way, if we are to fast, the act must have a definite and methodical outward expression. Do not let us be afraid of outward expressions of religion. Our Lord is emphasizing this, and this only, namely, the motive which we should have in all kinds of righteousness, whether it be worship or charity or self-subdual.
Thirdly, we shall do well to consider, what is the principle and meaning of fasting. Our Lord says less about it in the New Testament than about prayer;and you notice in the Revised Version that the mention of it has vanished from a good many of those passages where in the Authorized Version it stood side by side with prayer.[67] It is quite true, then, to say that our Lord says less about fasting than about prayer. It is quite true that fasting may be abused, and was in our Lord’s time abused, more easily than prayer; but it is a great mistake, because you have got a certain truth, therefore to exaggerate it. Our Lord Himself fasted, as He prayed; He fasted forty days and forty nights. Our Lordsaid the disciples should fast; that it would betoken the time when He was taken from them. St. Paul mentions fasting as part of his own practice—“in fastings often,”and he bids Christians “distress”[68] their bodies in order to reduce them to subjection. So again the Church from the first has fasted. And the great authors of religious revivals in our own Church—Simeon, and Pusey, and Maurice alike—practised and encouraged fasting. We may then depend upon it that we are foolish if we neglect it. And the object of it is this: it is the bringing the body under the spirit, whereas without it the body is apt to have the upper hand. It is not because our body is evil that we are to fast; but because our body is, or is meant to be, holy, and the effective instrument of the spirit. People sometimes talk about their body as if it were merely animal, and the spirit were only attached to it. That is not true. Our whole being is meant to be spiritual, as governed by the spirit. Just as when the principle of life takes hold on the inorganic world, it makes the whole nature organic of living; so whenthe spirit takes hold of the animal body, its work is to make the whole body spiritual.
It is worth while dwelling on this. People often justify sensual sin by saying it is “natural;” and the fallacy in this excuse lies in supposing that our body can be treated apart from our spirit. Nothing is natural to man in which his spiritual nature is not brought into play. This is the reason why Christian marriage is truly natural. It gives to the bodily relation of the sexes a spiritual purpose, and makes it serve high ends of the home and family. Thus in the same way eating and drinking is to serve spiritual ends. Everything that the true Christian does is part of a great spiritual whole; and it is, I say, because our body has grown lawless, and is apt to trample upon the spirit instead of being subordinate to it, that we have, as it were, to take revenges on the body and from time to time to harass it, as St. Paul says, and to hold it as a slave.
For the same reason we are foolish and un-Christian if we fast in such a way, either excessively or unwisely, as to unfit the body for spiritual activities. If youfast so that you cannot work, you are violating your duty. But many people eat and drink and sleep too well; their bodies have the upper hand; and they ought to fast, and to take the opportunity of Lent to fast, that their bodies may be brought under their spirits.
“The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother what thou wouldst allow
To ev’ry corporation.”
Now we must return to consider the parenthesis about prayer which is to be found in chapter vi. 7–15, and which teaches us something more than that its motive is to be not vainglory, but God.
First, we are taught that prayer is not to be measured by length, but intensity: