Lent

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LENT.

Religious teachings and observances are apt to be regarded as being founded on and exclusively relating to the affairs of the soul; but it admits of argument whether many of them are not principally based on corporeal and physiological truths. Deride as we may the theology of the Sepoys,¹ we must admit that the climate of the East Indies justifies and explains their abstinence from animal food, if not the sanctity with which they invest cattle. So with the Mohammedan and Jewish ablutions, and their prohibitions of pork and wine. These requirements have a proper hygienic, if not religious basis in the sultry climes of the East, if not in more temperate localities.

Thus it is, also, with the institution of Lent. We may not be convinced by Episcopalian arguments, of the sufficiency of the ecclesiastical authority invoked in favor of its observance; but we may nevertheless be satisfied by conference with our medical adviser, that our bodily health will be benefitted by a moderate degree of abstinence and a rigid attention to diet in the spring, when the seasons of the year begin to change.

With the religious character of the institution, as journalists, we have nothing to do. It rests on venerable traditionary authority, like the observance of the first day of the week, the rite of infant baptism, and a great many other things which habit leads many to venerate, and self will causes many others to repudiate. It is worthy of remark, however, what a number of associations in popular theology are connected with the Lenten duration, forty days. The number forty seems to have played an important part in theological history. There are the forty days during which the world was deluged; the forty years during which the Jews wandered in the wilderness; the forty days allowed Nineveh for repentance; the forty stripes with which malefactors were to be corrected; the forty days during which Moses fasted on receiving the law; the forty days’ fast of Elias; the forty days’ fast of Christ, &c. Probably the forty days of Lent are commemorative of some or all of these, and hence a large class of people hold the institution in respect. Their physical systems, we have no doubt, will derive from a strict observance of the fast, at least as much benefit as their souls will receive.

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