And therefore he biddeth
all who will be his disciples to take their crosses on their backs
as he did, and with their crosses follow him.
And where they say that fasting serveth but for temperance to tame
the flesh and keep it from wantonness, I would in good faith have
thought that Moses had not been so wild that for the taming of his
flesh he should have need to fast whole forty days together. No,
not Hely neither. Nor yet our Saviour himself, who began the
Lenten forty-days fast--and the apostles followed, and all
Christendom hath kept it--that these folk call now so foolish.
King Achab was not disposed to be wanton in his flesh, when he
fasted and went clothed in sackcloth and all besprent with ashes.
No more was the king in Nineveh and all the city, but they wailed
and did painful penance for their sin to procure God to pity them
and withdraw his indignation. Anna, who in her widowhood abode so
many years with fasting and praying in the temple till the birth
of Christ, was not, I suppose, in her old age so sore disposed to
the wantonness of the flesh that she fasted for all that. Nor St.
Paul, who fasted so much, fasted not all for that, neither. The
scripture is full of places that prove fasting to be not the
invention of man but the institution of God, and to have many more
profits than one.
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