"It is religion to keep fasting days": Cosin on the Lenten fast

From Cosin's Notes on the Book of Common Prayer (1638), on the rubric in the BCP 1559 Holy Communion requiring the Curate to "declare unto the people, whether there be anye holy dayes or fastynge dayes the weke folowyng". Cosin particularly refutes the Puritan (and later low church) claim that the call to observe the Lenten fast set forth in Edwardine and Elizabethan legislation was merely "politic", that is, for secular purposes. He thus demonstrates - as did Andrewes - that observing the Lenten fast was part of the discipline of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana, a discipline proclaimed in the epistle and gospel appointed for the first day of Lent:

They that speak so much against us, who put some part of our religion in keeping fasting days, as if we had nothing but a politic use of keeping Lent, Fridays, and saints' eves, let them look well to this place, where the curate is bound to exhort the people earnestly towards the religious observation of such times, in abstaining from their own wonted diet, and bestowing their liberality upon the poor. Certainly, if it be religion to give alms, it is religion to keep fasting days too, which are appointed by the Church to be spent in prayer and abstinence. Jejunium, eleemosyna, et oratio, went ever together, as here they do. If fasting days and Lent time be but a politic observation, without any religion in it at all, according to the conceit of some out of the statute of 5 Eliz., and before that 2 and 3 of Ed. VI., c.128 [the Edwardian and Elizabethan statues on the Lenten fast] what should the minister here meddle with it in the Church, the place where all our actions are, or should be, religious; or what should those religious prayers, epistle and gospel, upon the first day of Lent, do among us, seeing they all intend a solemn and a religious preparing of the people, and the whole Church of God among us, to the due keeping of that time with prayer and abstinence?

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laudable Practice

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