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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: worship. The severity of their fasts is equal to that of the
primitive church. In Lent they never eat till after sunset; their
fasts are the more severe because milk and butter are forbidden
them, and no reason or necessity whatsoever can procure them a
permission to eat meat, and their country affording no fish, they
live only on roots and pulse. On fast-days they never drink but at
their meat, and the priests never communicate till evening, for fear
of profaning them. They do not think themselves obliged to fast
till they have children either married or fit to be married, which
yet doth not secure them very long from these mortifications,
because their youths marry at the age of ten years, and their girls
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