The fast day which fifty years ago was a regular, annual season for supposed communion with a personal God by going without food and so getting into what was supposed to be a suitable state of mind, is pretty much done away with in the churches where a personal God is still worshipped. Why is this? Jesus says, "This kind cometh not forth except by fasting and prayer." What did he mean by fasting? Was it depriving ourselves of food? We do not read of his fasting (mortal mind) after he commenced his ministry. Before that time, while the evil was being exposed to his view, when he fasted, was it in the so-called orthodox manner of going without food? or was it Scientific fasting? When he understood that he could possess everything and all that mortal mind considers valuable, was it not the greatest fast that was ever witnessed, to say to all these supposed pleasures, "Get behind me"?
"After that he was an hungered." It was not material hunger for he had been offered everything in that line that the personal man could desire; but it was hungering after spirituality, and "Angels soaring thoughts came and ministered unto him." He had been fasting (cutting off the right hand and plucking out the right eye) and thus he came to feast on "the bread that cometh down from heaven." No one comes to feast except by fasting from the covetings of materiality. Scientific fasting is not going without food on stated occasions. Nor does it consist in depriving ourselves of things claimed by the sense of life as material. But it is to deny and destroy the sense itself from which the demand proceeds, through understanding of Divine Principle as all, and God as the only Life. This will cause the articles coveted in the false sense to disappear from consciousness, whether food, clothing, furniture, works of art, flowers or anything else material. If a house and furniture is held before the Good, and so having eyes we see Him not, or if a horse or dog draws our attention away from Spirit, or if there is an especial fondness for certain kinds of eatables or drinks etc., the call is to sell all we have of such covetings, and give to the poor,"—our own sense of Principle.
The rule as to all things of sense is, "eat what is set before you asking no questions for conscience sake." None of the desires for these loved things of sense can be taken into the kingdom of heaven. If Good is loved with all the heart, none of these things can come before the vision, for the desire to see Him will shut them out. All love for materiality is so much withheld from love of Truth. Spirituality is not gained by admiring beds of flowers, or any other of the objects beautiful to mortal mind. No works of art can ever lift into the realization of the real. Nothing material will ever give the understanding that is needful of the Infinite One. To abstain from desires for these loved things is scientific fasting, and the result will invariably be scientific feasting.
