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Show I WHAT IS MEANT BY LENT. The ecclesiastical season known as Lent (from the Saxon lenten, or springtime), dates from at least the beginning of the fourth century; that is to say, it is nearly one thousand three hundred years since the custom of observing a fast of forty days commemorating the forty days' fast of our Redeemer Re-deemer was established. St. Irenaeus martyred early in the third century, cen-tury, mentions that the custom of keeping a fast before Easter Sunday was quite okl even in his day. The manner of observing Lent naturally differed dif-fered in different countries, and the degrees of strictne-ss depended on climate and national habits, but everywhere in Christendom, before Luther's revolt, re-volt, Lent was a season consecrated to penance and mortification. The object of the church in establishing the fast of Lent was to instruct her children in the obligation obliga-tion of doing penance, and in the discipline of voluntary vol-untary suffering. It was to prepare them to fittingly fit-tingly celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ by inviting them to partake, so far as it was possible to the creature, in the sufferings through which it was expedient for Him to pass before He rose from the tomb and entered into His glory. Ash-Wednesday, which opens the season of Lent, is a day of public penance and humiliation in the Catholic church all over the world. It is called Ash-Wednesday for the reason that on this day the church blesses ashes emblem of the mortality of the body and her priest makes, with these ashes the sign of the cross the mark of our redemption on the forehead of each and every one of us, saying say-ing as he does so : "Remember, man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." (Gen. ii. 9.) Palms, which were blessed on the Palm Sunday of the year before, are burned in a stove or brazier, and the ashe of these palms is that with which the priest signs our foreheads. Aside from the obligation obliga-tion of fasting and abstaining, there are two other duties recommended by the church to each one of us. And these are prayer and the giving of alms, commonly called "charity to the poor," from which no one may plead exemption. These three Christian Chris-tian duties prayer, fasting ,ahns-giving are mentioned men-tioned together in our blessed Lord's sermon on the mount. All three are spoken of in a way that shows them to be equally binding on Christians. All three are guarded in the same way from the danger of hypocricy and outward show. We are not to sound a trumpet when we give alms. We are not to pray in the corners of the streets to be seen of men. |