I will assay to make
some help, and to lay him in this fashion. The station days were not the
Lord's days, together with those fifty betwixt Easter and Pentecost (on
which both fasting and kneeling were forbidden), as the Doctor thinketh,
but they were certain set days of fasting; for they appointed the fourth
and sixth day of the week (that is, Wednesday and Friday) for their
stations, as Tertullian saith;(768) whose words we may understand by
another place of Epiphanus,(769) who writeth that the fast of the fourth
and the sixth day was kept throughout all churches, and held to be an
apostolical constitution. Howbeit herein they did err; for to appoint a
certain time of fasting to be kept by the whole church agreeth not with
Christian liberty, and wanteth the example of Christ and his apostles, as
Osiander noteth.(770) Always we see what was meant by station days, to
wit, their set days of fifty, fasting, which were called station days, by
a speech borrowed from a military custom, as Tertullian teacheth. For as
soldiers kept those times and places which were appointed for their
watches, and fasted all the while they continued in them, so did
Christians upon their station days resort and meet in the place appointed,
and there remained fasting till their station dissolved. The Doctor taketh
upon him to confute those who understand by the station days set days of
fasting; but all which he allegeth to the contrary is, that he findeth
somewhere in Tertullian _statio_ and _jejunia_ put for different things.
Now this helpeth him not, except he could find that _statio_ and _stata
jejunia_ are put for different things; for no man taketh the stations to
have been occasional, but only set fasts. Touching the meaning, then, of
the words alleged by the Doctor (to give him his own reading of them,
howbeit some read otherwise), thus we take it. There were many who came
not to the sacrament upon the station days, because (in their opinion) the
receiving thereof should break the station, _i.e._, the service of the
day, and that because it should break their fast, a principal duty of the
same. Tertullian showeth they were in error, because their partaking of
the sacrament should not break their station, but make it the more solemn
and remarkable. But if they could not be drawn from that false persuasion
of theirs, that the sacrament should break their fast, yet he wisheth them
at least to come and stand at the table, and receive the sacra