The chief festivals are usually preceded by a time of preparation, consisting in many cases of only a single day, the vigil, but the preparation for Easter extends over nine weeks, and is composed of two parts, Lent, the more immediate preparation, and the three preceding Sundays, as a more distant and merely liturgical preparation. In Lent, it is the fast which plays the chief part, and presents itself as the essential feature of the whole time of preparation. From it, also, the other developments take their rise.[184] There are indications that, in the earliest times, Christians fasted on all Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year. This pious custom seems to have been so generally observed that, without having been enjoined by any formal enactment, it had, so to speak, the force of law. It is mentioned in the Didaché, in Hermas, and by Tertullian.[185] The latter calls these fasts “station-fasts,” and mentions that the fast lasted until 3 P.M. The custom had possibly been adopted from the Jews, for the Pharisees and Jewish ascetics in the time of Christ were wont to fast twice a week, on Monday and Thursday.[186] With regard to the East, Clement of Alexandria mentions[187] Wednesday and Friday as fast days, and, which is especially remarkable, these days were also so observed in the period after Constantine, at least for a great part of the year. The _Didascalia_ enjoins that these days be kept as fasts in the time after Whitsunday. The preceding season, the fifty days between Easter and Whitsunday, was a season of unmixed gladness, and so, according to the _Didascalia_, in Whitsun Week, these days were not fasts. We are led to the conjecture that this custom fell out of use in proportion as fasting became otherwise regulated, and the fast of forty days before Easter became a general law. That fasting should form an essential feature in the commemoration of Passion-tide had already been indicated in our Lord’s words (St Matt. ix. 15): “Can the children of the bridegroom mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?” To which question He Himself replied, “The days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast.” The days when the Bridegroom was taken away were held from the first to be those in which He lay in the grave, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. In the earliest times, these days were everywhere kept as fasts, and were observed by all, with exception of the quartodecimans, as obligatory fasts of the strictest kind.[188]