The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1873-03-02

churches than usual are open and religion
holds the worshipper night and day; when
fasting and prayer cast their solemn but not
unhappy shadows across worldly prosperity
| and fashion; when domestic mirth is shot and
| futed with the serious and sober tints of
gentle austerity, and the pink and gold of
pleasure subside for time beneath the soft
pearl color of punctual devotion. Society at
such o time resembles what an artist would
call ''gray day on the coast" and, to carry
out the simile, instead of flashing pillows and
q brilliant embroidery of surf, we have one
long broad calm, smooth as mirror, deep as
revery intense as self-consciousness The
'Peace, be STILL" of Lent is the eHectual echo
of Christ's voice commanding into silence
wave and wind. A hush, quiet as twilight,
falls on boudoir and drawing room. If Fashion
speaks her voice catches the cadence of the
litany, and the sweet, sad music of humanity
all becomes intoned. The heart weeps when
it remembers the Zion of happier days. and
the harps we hang on the willows are those of
memory and penitence.
Such season is upon us now. Sorrow is
the obligato accompaniment to sin, and during
Lent that accompaniment swells into louder
strain. Suspicious of the atmosphere of the
land flowing with milk and honey blow freshly
across us and we thrill with the fragrance of
the near figs and grapes of Eshcol We lose
sympathy with ourselves in past conditions of
pleasure seeking, and press forward, family,
perhaps, but honestly, to that spiritual plane
where the joys of the senses transmute them
brims with spontaneous kindness for
humanity, like the mothers breast with milk
at the thought of her starving babe, and all
our bronzed and crimson passions aspire after
| the hue Of those white emotions nourished by
the pure in heart. Love shines like the
Pleiades in the armament of the spirit and
blesses the universe with its meek pulsations.
Something of the Buttercup's infant simplicity
crops out above the red-fushed russell of our
moral Autumn and the etiolated LEAKAGE of q
Wintry conscience. Convictions that strike
home make us culver with the potentiality of
growing young again. Love to God and man
makes rift in the years that divide us from
childhood, and across the aching interval we
see the Sabbath school and hear the morning
and evening prayers we catch the Gliding
church bell and the fondly kissed good night,
and find ourselves softly repeating the words
of the hymn that we sung when we were
young.
Doubtless some Of our readers will object to
what they will call the sentimentality of this
view. They will declare that, so far as the sin
cerity of large majority of worshippers is
concerned, Lent is merely o conventional OBJ
servance, the relic Of superstition enjoined
by the priesthood and still cherished by the
fashionable world as sort of scapegoat for
the sins of the year. They will argue that
when society fagellates herself she uses silken
cords, and always contrives to make her
maceration as luxurious and picturesque as it
is temporary. They accuse the fair religieuse
of abjuring coffee only to luxuriate in tea and
maintain that the ostentatious ascetic mortifes
not only his flesh, but his friends. They con-
tend that there are other gates to heaven than
those of starvation, and that the anchorite of
the dinner table is not a hairs breadth nearer
to the Infinite than is the unintermittent eater
of chops and steaks. But spectacles of self
restraint are always CALLING to those who never
practise it. and he who leaves the board swollen
with rich repast cannot be expected to have
any profound sympathy with the pale propit-
ator who buffers his crusts with contrition
and offers broken heart over the broken
bread. 1t is easy for the good liver to console
himself with that poetic cant which proclaims
that every healthy wish is in itself prayer, and
that in order to worship God truly we must
show our appreciation Of the bodies He has
given US by furnishing them with delights.
Thus appetite and digestion become in some
degree the gauge of ones piety, and the prog
ress of religion in the soul is measured by the
amount of enjoyment we extract from
market money. On the whole, we think
the fasters have the best of the argu ment In
on age when most people not only eat too
much, but do not even know what to eat and
how to eat, voluntary self-restraint in the mat
ter is pretty fair evidence that conscience is at
work Conscience, indeed, may have made
an erroneous application of the principles of
right and wrong, and have been actuated by
excellent motives at an inexpedient hour, but
for the thousand victims of fasting and prayer
hundreds of thousands have fallen by the
hand of voracity. For every man that has
died Of sackcloth o thousand have died of sack
The Lent season, disAgured as it may be in
exceptional instances with insincerity and for
malism, is one Of the most valuable hold
backs of the scampering year. II 10 the very