SERMON III.

CHRISTIAN FASTING.

ST. LUKE, iv. 4.

It is written, that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

EVERY Christian minister, after he has been engaged in his office for several years, and has seen the return of the various solemn seasons of the church's calendar many times over, had need to remember and to call on others to remember the words which St. Paul uses to the Philippians: "To write the same things unto you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe." For as the truths of our redemption are still the same, and as our nature is still the same, and the faults and dangers of one year do not differ much from those of another, so the Christian minister must unavoidably say the same, or very nearly the

same things, in his preaching year after year. And when St. Paul says that to do this is to him not grievous, he means that there are causes which hinder him from feeling it to be grievous, although naturally it would be so. And naturally, no doubt, it is very irksome to be repeating only what we have said before, quite as irksome, I think, to the speaker as it can be to the hearer. But St. Paul says, "to me indeed it is not grievous, but for you it is safe;" and the reason, probably, why he did not feel it grievous was, because he knew that for his hearers it was safe; and so we ought all to feel when we say or hear in this place what has been in substance often said and heard before. The repetition is safe for us; that is, if we were not so to repeat, it would be the worse for both the speaker and the hearer. I mean that if, from a dread of saying what we have said before, we try to go off to something less familiar, what follows, but that we must put the less important truth in the place of the more important, and curious questions of little real value in the place of the word of life? For what we first speak of are naturally the great truths of the Gospel; whether the season be Advent or Lent, whether the festival be Christmasday or Easter, there is a natural course of address which presents itself for each of these occasions; there are certain duties and certain feelings which

properly belong to each, and for the furtherance of which, in fact, the seasons and festivals themselves are celebrated. If we are afraid of repeating ourselves, we must in fact say something more or less foreign to the occasion; because that which the occasion most demands is the very thing which would earliest suggest itself.

And thus as we are now arrived again almost at the beginning of Lent, and the same portions of Scripture are read in the Church service which were read last year, and in the years before it, it would seem that there is no choice but to repeat from this place also the same kind of exhortation. I spoke last year of Lent as a season designed to be marked by humiliation and self-denial. I considered how far fasting was a duty of all times and all countries in its literal sense, and whether there was not at any rate a kind of fasting, or of denying ourselves in our eating and drinking, which it would be clearly good for us to practise. I said also that this denial of ourselves should be connected with relieving the wants of others; and I gave notice that during Lent a box would be set up in the chapel, and in the several boarding-houses, to receive any sums down to the very smallest which any of you might like to save from his own indulgences, and to devote to the relief of his poorer brethren.

Now it seems to me that to say these same things over again this year ought not to be grievous, because it is indeed safe for us. If Lent was any thing last year, it is no less something now; if self-denial was a duty then, it is a duty now; and most certainly, if there was distress around us which needed relief, there is the same or even greater distress now. There are the same reasons for putting up the boxes here, and in the boarding-houses, which existed last year, and the same reasons also for asking you to give something to them, according as you may be disposed, for the sake of your brethren in part, but even more for the sake of yourselves.

But with all these reasons for saying the same things to you, there is another which makes the repetition with every successive year even more needed. All around us is wonderfully the same as it was last year, the same place, the same service, the very same aspect of outward things, even to the same lights thrown upon all around, which to those who observe them complete the resemblance of each season in one year to the same season in the year past, and seem in a manner to destroy the interval of time which has since past, and to represent the scenes of last year actually before us. All is the same with a most complete sameness, except our several selves. But we are

not the same; in some the change is more striking than in others, in some our own eyes tell us of the difference, and their own feelings tell it to them no less clearly; but in all of us a change has been wrought; we are not, and we cannot be, exactly such as we were when this same word of exhortation was last spoken and last heard.

est.

We are not the same by possibility. It is not in vain that a year passes over, even with the youngThe processes of life and thought do not go on for nothing. They make us inevitably either the better or the worse, the softer or the harder. If we take no heed of them we are the worse and the harder, and if we do turn, it will be a greater labour. To those who are become harder it may be irksome to hear the same things, but let this very irksomeness be itself an exhortation to them. It is irksome because while it is old to the ears it is perfectly strange and unintelligible to the mind. But where there is a change for the better from what we were last year, the same exhortation, if I mistake not, is not irksome, for we ourselves contain within us that which will give it variety. If conscience gives us the joyful witness that we are more advanced towards God than we were last year, every topic, the repetition of which we recognise, brings before us at the same time the image of our own improvement, suggesting, perhaps, the