New-York tribune., 1873-02-28
LENT OFT OF CHURCH.

LEhI OUJ OF tHOHtH.
If we had happened to be a Christian coun-
try three hundred years ago, this week of the
year would have brought woful change, not
only to our tables, but to our trade, to bust
ness to life indoors and on the street even
our clothes and faces would have become
funereal symbols Of the universal mourning
which the world had put on. Now, to many
of us, only an occasional changing church
bell, or the diminution of the number OF balls
in fashionable circles, or the rise IN the
price Of fish, reminds us that two Christian
sects vet observe the season of Lent. To the
most of us, too, it is apt to be regarded with
much the same respectful liberation that we
give to priesty garments, to the trappngs OF
Knights Templar. or to any other ancient
form out of which the meaning has almost
faded, and which we humOr or laugh at ac-
cording as we are radical or conservative. If
we concern ourselves at all about the matter,
it is to question why these forty days should
be supposed TO have n hOlier significance than
any other forty of the year. What spiritual
significance is in the fact that young Smith
abandons himself to dancing and terrapin un-
til midnight on Sbrove Tuesday, and falls
back to dry bread and early prayers the next
morning: why we should be expected to go out
in a more piOus frame of mind, or better
fitted TO fight the world and the devil IN OIL
fee or counting-rOom on meager breakfast
of eggs instead of our usual fOTtlfcatiOn OF a
iu,cy beefsteak7 In fact the anwonted
Lenten church bell is apt to ring as far
ont of tune and time with our daily prac-
teal life in shop or street as the old
al III
sleep, or the pure fancies of our first love
dreams. Yet when a man suddenly some day
feels that last icy cold creeping over his body,
and knows that this daily life is passing from
him, it is not past stocks or percentages he
remembers, but the woman he loved best and
the hymn his mother sang to him long ago.
1t might be worth while for the busiest of
us to stop and question if nothing more was
meant by the church bell than prayers twice a
day or a fish diet. Behind our modern pet
theories, whatever they may be, truths or
guesses regarding correlation of forces or our
monkey origin or spontaneous generation,
there still is God, whom they cannot touch.
Moses may disappear, his work done, but He
remains. "The Good" as the old Saxon had 1T,
is at work in every honest human word to-day
as much as when in that first morning OF
creation He set darkness apart from light.
The Savior, alone and in the desert, IN that
mysterious conflict with the spirit of evil,
brought himself into union with this In
visible spirit of good and the eally church
set aside Il season in which each man should
make an effort to do the same. There is the
whole secret of Lent Prescribing as they did
for mass of men who were unlearned and
DOOR, and whose strongest tempta-
tions lay in their appctites, these
oul-physicians of the earlier centuries
forbade meat not that fitch or roast was bad
in itself but that they might weigh the thing
they cared most for i'll the world
with the chance of that higher life be-
yond. Now Jones, Il scholar, does not
find temptation attack him through his
stomach; and when Smith, the Congressman,
goes without his dinner it only makes him
cross and dyspeptc. For Smith or Jones,
or our w-breakers or law wmakers, to
bring themselves to higher levels of
belief or action through abstaining from
beef and mutton, is hardly practicable
But what if, instead of chop and ragout, they
weigh and find the value of Rings, of Credit
Mobilier, of the Office which they won by the
foul work of others, or the money which they
were paid for foul work of their own. The Satan
of long ago. in a snakes skin or with horns and
hoof is but a vague specter now -a-days. But
cheating over counter or Senator's desk, bri-
berry avarice and lust are visible devils enough.
1t is no superstition nor priest-ridden folly
which drives any man back on himself for
season to test the value of the things for
which he is giving his life, whether they be
wine or women, money OF place, and to
determine whether there are not in him
capabilities of better service and better re-
ward. His Lent may be kept in church or
out, may last forty days or forty hours, but
when 1t is over he will find himself a msnlier
man, and will find, too, that the more real his
struggle has been the more akin it was to
that conflict in the desert eighteen centuries
ago, the history of which has come down to
each one of us, to-day, full of prophetic mean
ing.