Once more, our Lord is not here saying anything against the manifestation of our religion by outward acts. We cannot pray properly――speaking generally――without adopting a fit attitude in prayer, that is on the regular occasions of public and private prayer. We should pray in an attitude which befits our relation to God, on our knees, humbly, devoutly, because we are creatures of soul and body, and we cannot express the religious feeling of the soul properly without its influencing the gesture of the body also. We are made up of soul and body, and a “spiritual” act of worship is one in which the spirit, that is the will, heart, and intelligence is engaged; not one in which the body takes no part. Then if we learn to pray aright, kneeling upon our knees, we can carry the habit of prayer into our common life. In the same way, if we are to fast, the act must have a definite and methodical outward expression. Do not let us be afraid of outward expressions of religion. Our Lord is emphasizing this, and this only, namely, the motive which we should have in all kinds of righteousness, whether it be worship or charity or self-subdual. Thirdly, we shall do well to consider, what is the principle and meaning of fasting. Our Lord says less about it in the New Testament than about prayer; and you notice in the Revised Version that the mention of it has vanished from a good many of those passages where in the Authorized Version it stood side by side with prayer.[67] It is quite true, then, to say that our Lord says less about fasting than about prayer. It is quite true that fasting may be abused, and was in our Lord’s time abused, more easily than prayer; but it is a great mistake, because you have got a certain truth, therefore to exaggerate it. Our Lord Himself fasted, as He prayed; He fasted forty days and forty nights. Our Lord said the disciples should fast; that it would betoken the time when He was taken from them. St. Paul mentions fasting as part of his own practice――“in fastings often,” and he bids Christians “distress”[68] their bodies in order to reduce them to subjection. So again the Church from the first has fasted. And the great authors of religious revivals in our own Church――Simeon, and Pusey, and Maurice alike――practised and encouraged fasting. We may then depend upon it that we are foolish if we neglect it. And the object of it is this: it is the bringing the body under the spirit, whereas without it the body is apt to have the upper hand. It is not because our body is evil that we are to fast; but because our body is, or is meant to be, holy, and the effective instrument of the spirit. People sometimes talk about their body as if it were merely animal, and the spirit were only attached to it. That is not true. Our whole being is meant to be spiritual, as governed by the spirit. Just as when the principle of life takes hold on the inorganic world, it makes the whole nature organic of living; so when the spirit takes hold of the animal