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| The Physical Tendencies of Fasting and Feeding Considered. The Cases of Moses and Elijah.
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Chapter VI.—The
Physical Tendencies of Fasting and Feeding Considered. The Cases
of Moses and Elijah.
Now, if there has been temerity in our retracing
to primordial experiences the reasons for God’s having laid, and
our duty (for the sake of God) to lay, restrictions upon food, let us
consult common conscience. Nature herself will plainly tell with
what qualities she is ever wont to find us endowed when she sets us,
before taking food and drink, with our saliva still in a virgin
state, to the transaction of matters, by the sense especially whereby
things divine are handled; whether (it be not) with a mind much more
vigorous, with a heart much more alive, than when that whole habitation
of our interior man, stuffed with meats, inundated with wines,
fermenting for the purpose of excremental secretion, is already being
turned into a premeditatory of privies, (a premeditatory) where,
plainly, nothing is so proximately supersequent as the savouring of
lasciviousness. “The people did eat and drink, and they
arose to play.”1032
| 1032 Comp. 1
Cor. x. 7 with Ex. xxxii. 6. | Understand
the modest language of Holy Scripture: “play,” unless
it had been immodest, it would not have reprehended. On the other
hand, how many are there who are mindful of religion, when the seats of
the memory are occupied, the limbs of wisdom impeded? No one will
suitably, fitly, usefully, remember God at that time when it is
customary for a man to forget his own self. All discipline food
either slays or else wounds. I am a liar, if the Lord Himself,
when upbraiding Israel with forgetfulness, does not impute the cause to
“fulness:” “(My) beloved is waxen thick, and
fat, and distent, and hath quite forsaken God, who made him, and hath
gone away from the Lord his Saviour.”1033
In short, in the self-same
Deuteronomy, when bidding precaution to be taken against the self-same
cause, He says: “Lest, when thou shalt have eaten, and
drunken, and built excellent houses, thy sheep and oxen being
multiplied, and (thy) silver and gold, thy heart be elated, and thou be
forgetful of the Lord thy God.”1034
To the corrupting power of riches He
made the enormity of edacity antecedent, for which riches themselves
are the procuring agents.1035
Through them,
to wit, had “the heart of the People been made thick, lest they
should see with the eyes, and hear with the ears, and understand with a
heart”1036
| 1036 See Isa. vi. 10; John xii. 40; Acts xxviii.
26, 27. | obstructed by the
“fats” of which He had expressly forbidden the
eating,1037
teaching man not to
be studious of the stomach.1038
| 1038 See Deut. viii. 3; Matt. iv. 4; Luke iv.
4. |
On the other hand, he whose “heart”
was habitually found “lifted up”1039
| 1039 See Ps.
lxxxvi. 4 (in LXX. lxxxv. 4); Lam. iii. 41 (in LXX. iii. 40). |
rather than fattened up, who in forty days and as many nights
maintained a fast above the power of human nature, while spiritual
faith subministered strength (to his body),1040
| 1040 Twice over. See
Ex. xxiv. 18 and xxxiv. 28; Deut. ix. 11,
25. |
both saw with his eyes God’s glory, and heard with his ears
God’s voice, and understood with his heart God’s law:
while He taught him even then (by experience) that man liveth not upon
bread alone, but upon every word of God; in that the People, though
fatter than he, could not constantly contemplate even Moses himself,
fed as he had been upon God, nor his leanness, sated as it had been
with His glory!1041
| 1041 See Ex. xxxiii. 18, 19, with xxxiv.
4–9, 29–35. | Deservedly,
therefore, even while in the flesh, did the Lord show Himself to him,
the colleague of His own fasts, no less than to Elijah.1042
| 1042 See Matt. xvii. 1–13; Mark ix.
1–13; Luke ix. 28–36. | For Elijah withal had, by this fact
primarily, that he had imprecated a famine,1043
already sufficiently devoted himself to fasts: “The Lord
liveth,” he said, “before whom I am standing in His
sight, if there shall be dew
in these years, and rain-shower.”1044
Subsequently, fleeing from threatening
Jezebel, after one single (meal of) food and drink, which he had found
on being awakened by an angel, he too himself, in a space of forty days
and nights, his belly empty, his mouth dry, arrived at Mount Horeb;
where, when he had made a cave his inn, with how familiar a meeting
with God was he received!1045
“What
(doest) thou, Elijah, here?”1046
Much
more friendly was this voice than, “Adam, where art
thou?”1047
For the
latter voice was uttering a threat to a fed man, the former soothing a
fasting one. Such is the prerogative of circumscribed food, that
it makes God tent-fellow1048
| 1048 Comp. Matt. xvii. 4; Mark ix. 5; Luke ix.
33. | with
man—peer, in truth, with peer! For if the eternal God will
not hunger, as He testifies through Isaiah,1049
| 1049 See Ps. xl. 28 in LXX. In E.V., “fainteth
not.” |
this will be the time for man to be made equal with God, when he lives
without food.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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