DISCOMFITURE OF THE HEATHEN DEITIES. 107 No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The lonely mountains o'er, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; The parting genius is with sighing sent; The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. In consecrated earth, And on the holy hearth, The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns, and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat. Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim, With that twice-battered god of Palestine ; And moonèd Ashtaroth, Heaven's queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; They called the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste. Nor is Osiris seen In Memphian grove or green, Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud : Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest ; Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud : The sable-stolèd sorcerers bear his worshipped ark. He feels from Juda's land The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn; Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide, Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine; Our Babe, to show His Godhead true, Can in His swaddling bands control the damned crew. Lent. I is observed by Philo Judæus that the Law 'sets down every day as a festival;' the unfailing celebration of which, however, is to be assured only by a constant and uninterrupted perfection of virtue.* From the defect of the latter in human experience arises the frequent solution of the opportunity, and even of the faculty, of rejoicing. Granting that the life of perfect virtue would be a life of perfect pleasure and content, yet the life of imperfection, the only one of which we are actually aware, must be darkened by many a shadow, crossed and chequered by many a sorrow. The sin-laden individual must occasionally and of set purpose afflict his soul,' and sin-conscious communities, which are the aggregates of such individuals, will now and again assume the outward signs of a heart-seated penitence and self-deprecation. The tendency to humiliation on account of sin has found historical exposition in all ages and amongst all peoples; and has manifested itself in every degree of mortification-from the sincere humiliation of repentance, and the desire to keep the inferior body in subjection to the superior soul, to a morose and sanguinary asceticism, the object of which was often, by external and mechanical processes, to compel an abatement of the Divine wrath, or a bestowal of the Divine favour. Traces of fasting, as a particular method of humiliation, are to be discovered in the records of nearly all the principal nations of the world. Now a fast was proclaimed as a state ceremonial for political purposes; now it was observed that a military expedition might be auspiciously initiated or triumphantly concluded; and again, that a social or municipal disaster might be averted, miti *Treatise to show that the Festivals are Ten in Number. OBSERVANCE OF FASTS. 109 gated, or removed. Now a fast was dictated by the will or the necessities of the individual, whether king, emperor, magistrate, or citizen; and again, it was enjoined upon the members of a philosophical school or priestly college, or upon the aspirants after initiation into the various mysteries which the multiform cultus of Paganism so bountifully fostered. The exceptionally occurring or seasonably recurring fasts of social exigencies or of religious privileges were by some of the choicer and severer spirits of the Greek philosophy, extended into a canonical rule and regimen. Some of the Cynics fed upon nothing but herbs and cold water, living in any shelter that they could find, or in tubs, as Diogenes did."* Epicurus- a startling fact to those who are familiar chiefly with the degradation of his system and the abuse of his definitions-' was content with water and plain bread,' to which, if cheese were at any time added, it was counted for a banquet. It is more generally known that Pythagoras inculcated the observance of a perpetual Lent; and one account of the death of this philosopher, as given by Dicæarchus, and quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, is to the effect that he died of starvation in or near the Temple of the Muses, at Metapontum, after having abstained from food for forty days.'‡ The last few words are remarkable for bringing the idea of fasting, or abstinence, into contact with that of a quadragesimal interval of time; and to this, as the reader may surmise, we shall very soon have occasion to recur. But in the next two or three short paragraphs we wish to trace generally the history of fasting amongst the Jews, who were given to its observance whenever they found themselves face to face with critical or disastrous circumstances (Judges xx. 26; 1 Sam. vii. 6, and xxxi. 13; 2 Sam. iii. 35; Isa. lviii. 3-6). The legislation of Moses was concerned as little as possible about fasts; and in the earliest times of the Jewish polity they were of desultory celebration, the spontaneous product and expression of the nation, the city, the family, or the individual. The great Lawgiver enjoined only one season of fasting, but that he inculcated under the severest of penalties and with the most solemn of sanctions (Levit. xxiii. 26-32). It occurred on the tenth day of the seventh month, a month which had been initiated by the Feast of Trumpets, and the fifteenth of which was to be the commencement of the Feast of Tabernacles. It was not till the times of the Captivity that other anniversary fasts were added to the single one of Mosaic institution. These were held severally on the seventeenth day of the fourth month, Tammuz (July); the ninth day of the fifth month, or Ab (August); the third of the seventh month, or Tishri (October); and the tenth day of the tenth month, or Zebeth (January); and severally commemorated the capture of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, the death of Gedaliah, and the commencement of the attack on Jerusalem. There is a promise that all these fasts should, at some future period, 'be to the house of Judah joy and gladness and cheerful feasts' (Zech. viii. 19). The period thus indeterminately promised of the Lord has not yet arrived, and His ancient and scattered people still continue to observe these yearly seasons as times of fasting and humiliation.* The number forty, and the quadragesimal interval of time, have frequently been invested with a peculiar interest by the events connected with sacred history; a circumstance which did not escape the attention of the Fathers, or of the theologers only less ancient than they. The devoutness of the latter, combining with their tendency to the detection or invention of analogies and coincidences, habitually condescended to the minute, and did not always stop short of the trivial. The following are among the more relevant of their speculations in the sphere of our present inquiries :-The appositeness of the Christian Lent has been pointed by the fact that the world was drowned during forty days, and that it was after the ark had rested for a like interval on Mount Ararat that Noah sent forth the reconnoitring raven. To one or other of these intervals, tradition affixed a fast. Herrick, in his 'Noble Numbers,' sings: Noah the first was, as tradition says, That did ordain a fast of forty days. It was to a space of forty years that the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert were protracted; it was with forty stripes that the malefactor was to be beaten under the law of Moses; and the time of grace allowed to Nineveh for repentance was forty days, during which a fast was proclaimed that was to extend from the king downwards, not only to the meanest of his subjects, but to the very cattle, whose lives, indeed, along with the lives of their owners, were at stake in the threatened destruction. But whilst these and other quadragesimal intervals may illustrate with more or less of relevancy and pertinence the existing institution of the Christian Lent, the period of abstinence acquires its most important significance when it is regarded as en rapport with the fasts of Moses and Elias, and its most Divine sanction when it is regarded as humbly imitative of the fasting of our Lord in the wilderness. There is a solemn warrant for the celebration of the last-mentioned fast in connection with the two former, when it is remembered that the conjunction of Moses and Elias with the Saviour is not arbitrary or capricious on the part of the Church. It Jahn's Biblical Archæology. * was Moses and Elias, who, severally representing the Law and the Prophets, severally and together found themselves complete in the person of Jesus Christ, with whom they, and they only of all anterior saints, were associated in the splendours of 'the Holy Mount '--an association which was one of the circumstances appealed to by Isidore of Seville, as proving the concord and agreement of the Gospel with the Law and the Prophets. For the Law,' he says, 'is accepted in the person of Moses, the Prophets in the person of Elias, between whom Christ appeared glorious on the Mount of Transfiguration.* And he appeals for a dogmatic confirmation of what was thus symbolically rendered, to the words of St. Paul: 'Now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets' (Rom. iii. 21). But there are analogies of practice as well as of sentiment; and it has been rendered extremely probable by the elaborate researches of Bishop Hooper (Bath and Wells, 1703-1727), that 'the derivation of our Christian Lent is from a like preparatory time of the Jews,' which preceded their yearly Expiation. This preparatory time, which was one of solemn humiliation, as the bishop proves on the testimony of Jewish authors, began forty days before the Expiation; and the coincidence of its duration with that of the Christian Lent he shows not to be casual, nor a single similitude,' since 'there were in the Christian religion many other like correspondences which must apparently be attributed to the same original.† The primitive Christians, in accordance with the precedent of the Jews, established a fast as a becoming preparation for the commemoration of the great Expiation for the sins of the whole world. That the Christian Lent, however, was not always of the length of forty days, and, indeed, not always of any uniform duration whatever, is a matter which we may defer for a sentence or two, until we have glanced at the obligation of fasting at all. 'The doctrine and practice of our Lord and His apostles respecting fasting may be thus described :-Our Saviour neglected the observances of those stated Jewish fasts which had been superadded to the Mosaic law, and introduced especially after the Captivity, to which the Pharisees paid scrupulous attention (Matt. xi. 18, 19); and He represented such observances as inconsistent with the genius of His religion (Matt. ix. 14-18; and parallel passages, Mark xi. 15-22; Luke v. 33-39). The practice of voluntary and occasional fasting He neither prohibited or enjoined; He spoke of it, however, as being not unsuitable in certain conditions, nor without its use in certain cases (Matt. ix. 15; xvii. 21); He fasted Himself on a great and solemn occasion (Matt. iv. 2), and He warned His disciples against all ostentations and hypocritical observances of this kind *De Ecclesiasticis Officiis. + Bishop Hooper's Discourse concerning Lent. |