LXXII. The matching of contrary things together is a kind of illustration to both. Having therefore spoken thus much of festival days, the next that offer themselves to hand are days of pensive humiliation and sorrow. Fastings are either of men’s own free and voluntary accord as their particular devotion doth move them thereunto; or else they are publicly enjoined in the Church and required at the hands of all men. There are1 which altogether disallow not the former kind, and the latter they greatly commend, so that it be upon extraordinary occasions only, and after one certain manner exercised. But yearly or weekly fasts such as ours in the Church of England they allow no farther than as the temporal state of the land doth require the same for the maintenance of seafaring men and preservation of cattle, because the decay of the one and the waste of the other could not well be prevented but by a politic order appointing some such usual change of diet as ours is.
We are therefore the rather to make it manifest in all men’s eyes, that set times of fasting appointed in spiritual considerations to be kept by all sorts of men took not their beginning either from Montanus or any other whose heresies may prejudice the credit and due estimation thereof, but have their ground in the law of nature, are allowable in God’s sight, were in all ages heretofore, and may till the world’s end be observed not without singular use and benefit.
Much hurt hath grown to the Church of God through a false imagination that fasting standeth men in no stead for any spiritual respect, but only to take down the frankness of nature and to tame the wildness of flesh. Whereupon the world being bold to surfeit doth now blush to fast, supposing that men when they fast, do rather bewray a disease, than exercise a virtue. I much wonder what they who are thus persuaded do think, what conceit they have concerning the fasts of the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, our Lord Jesus Christ himself.
The affections of Joy and Grief are so knit unto all the actions of man’s life, that whatsoever we can do or may be done unto us, the sequel thereof is continually the one or the other affection. Wherefore considering that they which grieve and joy as they ought cannot possibly otherwise live than as they should, the Church of Christ, the most absolute and perfect school of all virtue, hath by the special direction of God’s good Spirit hitherto always inured men from their infancy partly with days of festival exercise for the framing of the one affection, and partly with times of a contrary sort for the perfecting of the other. Howbeit over and besides this, we must note that as resting so fasting likewise attendeth sometimes no less upon the actions of the higher, than upon the affections of the lower part of the mind. Fasting (saith Tertullian2) is a work of reverence towards God. The end thereof sometimes elevation of mind; sometime the purpose thereof clean contrary. The cause why Moyses in the Mount did so long fast was mere divine speculation, the cause why David, humiliation3. Our life is a mixture of good with evil4. When we are partakers of good things we joy, neither can we but grieve at the contrary. If that befall us which maketh glad, our festival solemnities declare our rejoicing to be in him whose mere undeserved mercy is the author of all happiness; if any thing be either imminent or present which we shun, our watchings, fastings, cries and tears are unfeigned testimonies, that ourselves we condemn as the only causes of our own misery, and do all acknowledge him no less inclinable than able to save. And because as the memory of the one though past reneweth gladness; so the other called again to mind doth make the wound of our just remorse to bleed anew, which wound needeth often touching the more, for that we are generally more apt to calendar saints’ than sinners’ days, therefore there is in the Church a care not to iterate the one alone but to have frequent repetition of the other.
Never to seek after God saving only when either the crib or the whip doth constrain were brutish servility: and a great derogation to the worth of that which is most predominant in man, if sometime it had not a kind of voluntary access to God and of conference as it were with God, all these inferior considerations laid aside. In which sequestration forasmuch as5 higher cogitations do naturally drown and bury all inferior cares, the mind may as well forget natural both food and sleep by being carried above itself with serious and heavenly meditation, as by being cast down with heaviness, drowned and swallowed up of sorrow.