From one point of view it is legitimate to surmise that as the early Christians confused the Christmas quickening with birth symbolism and placed the birth of the Sun of God in March, so possibly they likewise were confused about the festival of forty days which commemorated the period of incubation of life-seed in
the earth, and therefore shifted Lent to the wrong side of the year! There is strong, indeed almost irrefutable support for the assertion that all the significations of Lent appertain in nature's book of typism to the autumn. The spirit of Lent is entirely negative, the intimations are all dour, sad and dismal. Thus it rightly would find fitting appositeness only in the fall, when the sun-in-man, descending like the sun in the sky of autumn to shorter and feebler daily manifestation, or obscuration of its power, and sinking under the dominion of darkness, is pictured in the old Ember Days festivals as sitting like Cinderella in her hovel trying to keep warm beside the dying embers of her hearth-fire. Many forms of this dramatism survived in different lands and all were ritualized in the autumn.
We have in fact in our year of commemorative days a period of forty days, beginning with the fall equinox of September 21 and ending on October 31. This "autumn Lent" is terminated by our Hallowe'en carousal on October 31, and this is followed on the following day, November 1, by All Souls' Day, or All Saints' Day, the more ancient Michaelmas. In England Hallowe'en was formerly called Nutcracker's Night. The four cardinal "corners" of the zodiac were dedicated to the four chief Angles of the Presence, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel. Michael's station was at the fall equinox. It could be affirmed that the period of forty days in the fall is the true Lent. This will no doubt be refuted by orthodox religionism, which will point to the etymological derivation of Lent from the German
Lenz, meaning "spring." The evidence is not at hand to support a claim that this German word is not the partent of "Lent."
The change of a "z" to a "t" is not frequent in language derivatives. But even if the claimed source be correct, it does not alter the fact that the symbolic elements of the Ember Days and the soul's descent to darkness and destitution of light in the bodily milieu down here would suggest autumn as the fitting time for dramatizing the crucifixion, death and burial and all the gloom of Passion Week, as well as the whole of Lent. The observance of Lent in the spring, when beyond all argument the psychological intimations of the Lenten message and motive are entirely out of accord with the spirit of nature springing to new life in every blade of grass, bud and leaf, in growing sunshine and beauty on every side, must be considered an anachronism of the sorriest and most glaring ineptitude. Certainly in the long run it has gone far to dim the sun of happy springtime joyousness in all the life of Christianity.
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