ill 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 book