“Fasting means going without things, whether amusements, food, sleep, or selfish ease, so as to have more money for alms, and more time for serious reading and religious meditation, earnest prayer, and the practice of true religion, which is to visit the fatherless and widows, the sick and needy, in their affliction.”
Cortlandt Whitehead (1842-1922) Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh in Lent: The Holy Season (Neale Publishing Company, 1902) 63.