A Practical Treatise On Diseases of the Skin in Children, from the Fr., with Notes, by R.H. Blake

Such common-sense teaching is heady wine. Will anyone put new wine like this into old wine skins? “If one does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins”(Mark 2:22). From early on, however, the followers of Jesus have tried to do just this: tried to contain the new spirit within the old forms.The result is compromise — patchwork. “No one sews a piece of un-shrunk cloth on an old garment; if he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made (Mark 2:21).That’s common sense.Yet, for almost two millennia now, church institutions have suffered rift after rift because of precisely such patchwork. One handy example is fasting as a prescribed religious observance. Voluntary fasting can be a healthy practice. There are many good reasons for fasting, but earning God’s favor thereby is not one of them. God’s love — like a mother’s — need not be earned, only celebrated, Jesus held. He did not fast; in fact, they called him “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19) ...»