your children and to marry them when they grow up?  To mount your pulpits every Sabbath-day, and to come to your houses every week-day?  Not, I feel sure, if you could help it!  Not if you knew it!  Not if there was a minister of proper pulpit manners and a well-ordered mind within a Sabbath-day’s journey!  ’Like priest like people,’ says Hosea.  ‘The congregation and the minister are one,’ says Dr. Parker.  ’There are men we could not sit still and hear; they are not the proper ministers for us.  There are other men we could hear always, because they are our kith and our kin from before the foundation of the world.’  Happy the hearer who has hit on a minister like the minister of Mansoul, and who has discovered in him his everlasting kith and kin.  And happy the minister who, owning kith and kin with Boanerges, has two or three or even one member in his congregation who likes his minister best when he likes himself worst.

But what about the fasting all this time?  Was it all preaching, and was there no fasting?  Well, we do not know much about the fasting of the prophets and the apostles, but the Puritans sometimes made their people almost forget about fasting, and about eating and drinking too, they so took possession of their people with their incomparable preaching.  I read, for instance, in Calamy’s Life of John Howe that on the public Fast-days, it was Howe’s common way to begin about nine in the morning and to continue reading, preaching, and praying till about four in the afternoon.  Henry Rogers almost worships John Howe, but John Howe’s Fast-days pass his modern biographers patience; till, if you would see a nineteenth-century case made out against a seventeenth-century Fast-day, you have only to turn to the author of The Eclipse of Faith on the author of Delighting in God.  And, no doubt, when we get back our Fast-days, we shall leave more of the time to reading pertinent books at home and to secret fasting and to secret prayer, and shall enjoin our preachers, while they are pertinent and authoritative in their sermons, not to take up the whole day with their sermons even at their best.  And then, as to fasting, discredited and discarded as it is in our day, there are yet some very good reasons for desiring its return and reinstatement among us.  Very good reasons, both for health and for holiness.  But it is only of the latter class of reasons that I would fain for a few words at present speak.  Well, then, let it be frankly said that there is nothing holy, nothing saintly, nothing at all meritorious in fasting from our proper food.  It is the motive alone that sanctifies the means.  It is the end alone that sanctifies the exercise.  If I fast to chastise myself for my sin; if I fast to reduce the fuel of my sin; if I fast to keep my flesh low; if I fast to make me more free for my best books, for my most inward, spiritual, mystical books—­for my Kempis, and my Behmen, and my Law, and my Leighton,