Hitherto we have spoken of the observance of Saturday, the day of rest prescribed to the Jews, and to which exclusively the name of the Sabbath day was anciently applied, and still continues to be given by every nation but our own and its offshoots. At what date the Sunday or first day of the week began to be generally used by Christians as a stated time for religious meetings, we have no definite information either in the New Testament or in the writings of the fathers of the church (q.v.). By none of the fathers before the 4th c. is it identified with the Sabbath, nor is the duty of observing it grounded by them either on the fourth commandment, or on the precept or example of Jesus or his apostles, or on an ante-Mosaic Sabbath law promulgatedlo mankind at the creation and continuing in force after the coining of Christ. To the reality of such a law—which many modern Christians have deduced from Gen. ii. 2, 3; iv. 3; vii. 4, 10; viii. 4, 10-12; xxix. 27; 1. 10; Ex. xvi. 4-30, and which some (as bishop Horsley, Serm. 22) regard as an indispensable basis for a Christian Sabbath—it has been objected that the attention of the Gentile converts, who must be supposed to have been ignorant of the law in ques tion, is nowhere found in Scripture to have been directed to it by Paul; that his declara tions of their freedom from the observance of days are so general as to apply to every law on that subject,. whensoever enacted; that consequently he must either have been unacquained with a primeval law, or if not) have regarded it as obsolete under the new dispensation; and lastly, that the fathers, had they known such a law, would have mentioned it in their writings, instead of vindicating (as Justin, for instance, does in his Dialogue with lrypho the Jew) the neglect of Sabbath-keeping by Gentile Christians, on the ground that the Sabbath began with Moses and was not observed by the patri archs. By none of the fathers is any Sabbath-law whatever represented as being in force among the Gentiles.
On what grounds, then, did the Christians observe the first day of the week as a time for religions assemblies?—and how and when did the custom of so distinguishing it begin? To these questions very different answers have been given. According to some theologians apostolic precept or example is the only conceivable origin of a cus tom apparently so general as well as early; and of such example, at least, they find evi dence in John xx. 19, 26; Acts ii. 1; xx. 6, 7; 1 Car. xvi. 1, 2; and Rev. i, 10, But others; doubting or denying the conclusiveness of this scriptural proof, conceive that an adequate explanation may be found in the circumstances of the primitive church. That the desire which naturally actuates the members of every new and unpopular religious sect to meet frequently for worship, instruction, and mutual encouragement might very soon lead to the fixing of stated days for that purpose, may be assumed as self-evident; that a weekly day should be chosen would be a natural result of the Jewish habits of the earliest Christians; and that the day on which their Lord had risen victorious front the grave should be thought fittest for this weekly festival is precisely what was to be expected in their circumstances. But the resurrection of Jesus is by no means the only reason assigned by the fathers for the honor which they paid to the Sunday. By Justin (see JusTrirs), in whose Apology for the Christians to Antoninus Pius, as. 87-89, written between 138 and 150 A.D., the earliest undoubted mention of Sunday meetings in the works of the fathers occurs, several reasons for holding them then are assigned—the first being that on this day of the week the world and light were created; and the second being the resurrection of Christ. "We, all of us," says he, "assemble together on Sunday, because it is the first day in which God changed darkness and matter, and made the world. On the same day, also, Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead; for he was crucified on the clay before that of Saturn; and on the day after that of Saturn, which is thht of the sun, he appeared to his apostles and disciples, and taught them what we now submit to your consideration." To these reasons, Origen (Scrod% Rom. on E.rod.) adds the fact that manna was first given to the Israelites on a Sunday; while subsequent writers adduce various other events, either recorded, or by them imagined to have occurred on that day. In arguing with Trypho, Justin opposes Sabbath-keeping by Christians, ou grounds which would have been retorted by the Jew as condemning equally the observance of a first-day Sabbath, had the Sunday at that time been regarded as the Sabbath: from which fact and the circumstance that in his Apology already spoken of, where he professes to give the emperor Antoninus a full account of the observance of the day, no mention is made of rest from labor as a part of that observance, the inference has been drawn that, except during the time of divine service, the Christians in this father's age thought it lawful to follow, and actually did follow, their wordly pursuits on the Sunday. is true that by Tertullian, who wrote in the latter half of the 2d c., the Christians arc described as "putting off even their business on the Lord's day, lest they might give place to the devil " We Oral. c. 23); an indication, in Meander's opinion (Church, List. i. 499, Bohn's ed.), that now the Jewish law of the Sabbath had begun to be applied to the Lord's day. But the soundness of this interpretation has been questioned—Dr. Hessey, for instance (Bampton Lectures, 1860, p. 63), stating that he can find in it "nothing Sabbatarian—nothing, in fact, more than I should have expected, considering slat the church had now become somewhat settled —that, rather than that the duties reculiar to the Lord's day should be neglected, wordly business was put off to another day." But whatever may have been the opinion and practice of these early Christians in regard to cessation from labor on the Sunday, unquestionably the first law, either ecclesiastical or civil, by which the sabbatical observ ance of thst day is known to have been ordained, is the edict of Constantine, 321 A.D.,
of which the following is a translation: "Let all judges, inhabitants of the cities, and artificers rest on the venerable Sunday. But in the country husbandmen may freely and lawfully apply to the business of agriculture; since it often 'happens that the sowing of corn and planting of vines cannot be so advantageously performed on any other day; lest, by neglecting the opportunity, they should lose the benefits which the divine bounty bestows on us" (Ccd. iii. 12, 3). Before this time, such of the Christian writers as had endeavored, by a mystical style of interpretation, to turn the Mosaic cere monies to account as sources of moral and religious instruction, had, probably in imitation of Philo (q.v.) (lVorls, iii. 265, Bohn's ed.), spiritualized the law of the Sabbath to the effect of representing it as a mystical prohibition to the Christian of evil works during all the days of his life, and a prefiguration of tile spiritual repose and enjoyment which is his portion both in this world and in the next. But in addition to this significance, there now began to be discovered in the Old Testament, foreshadowings of the new Sunday Sabbath ; and Eusebius (q.v.), bishop of Cmsarea, the friend and biographer of Constan tine, was able to descry in Ps. xlvi. 5, and lix 16, prophetic allusions to the 97101,12719 assemblies of Christians on Sundays for worstilp, and in Psal. xxii. 29, a prefiguration of the weekly celebration of the Lord's-supper on that day. Applying Ps. xcii. to the first day of the week, the same writer says that " the word, by the new covenant, trans lated and transferred the feast of the Sabbath to the morning light, and gave us the symbol of true rest—viz., the saving Lord's day, the first of the light," etc. From other passages in Ensabius and subsequent writers, it is plain that they meant, not that this transference had been formally ordained by Christ (of which there is no trace in Scrip ture), but that by rising from the tomb ,on the first day of the week he bad made that day more illustrious than the Sabbath, and more worthy to be celebrated by the holding of 'Christian assemblies for worship than the Sabbath was to be similarly honored by the Jews. About the end of the 4th c. Chrysastom is found similarly expounding Gen. ii. 3, which, in his opinion, shows that already from the beginning God offered us instruc tion typically, teaching its to dedicate and separate the one day in the circle of the week wholly to employment in things spiritual—thus (as his translator observes) making the Sabbath a type of the Lord's day, and rest from bodily, of rest in spiritual work. (Li brary of the Fathers, ix. 209.) It was a natural result of Constantine's law, backed by such interpretations of the Old Testament as these, that in the words of Dr. Hessey, "a new era in thd history of the Lord's clay now commenced; tendencies toward sabbaturianism or confusion of the Christian with the Jewish institution beginning to manifest themselves. These, however, were slight until the end of the 5th c., and are traceable chiefly to and in the civil legis lation of the period. Afterward they developed themselves more decidedly; sabhatari anism became at length systematized, in one of its phases, in the ante-reformation church both in England and on the continent by the later schoolmen, probably in their desire to lay down exact rules for consciences, and under a fancied necessity of urging the pre. cedent of Jewish enactments in support of Christian holy-days" (p. 20). 13ut it was not till the year 538 that abstinence from agricultural labor on Sunday was recommended, rather than enjoined, by an eceleSiastical (the third council of Orleans), and this expressly "that the people might have more leisure to go to church and say their prayers;" nor was it till about the end of the 9th c. that the emperor Leo, "the philoso pher," repealed the exemption which it enjoyed under the edict of Constantine (Leo. 54). And now the Lord's Day being thoroughly established by law as a Sabbath, the fourth commandment would more than ever be employed by the clergy as a means of persuading to its observance. The entire decalogue, indeed, has long been used by them as a summary of human duty; and by the later schoolmen it came to be represented as, to a certain extent—i.e., so far as it coincided with the law of nature —actually obligatory on Christians. This theory of its binding force and the notion of the holiness of days were vigorously opposed by Luther and the other reformers. who denounced also the excessive multiplication of festivals, and the pardon of sin was not to be secured by their observance, or otherwise than by faith in Christ. (See Luther's Larger Catechism; the Augsburg Confession, 1530, c. vii.; Calvin's //ma tt/tee, b. ii. ch. viii. ss. 28-34; and his other writings on the subject, collected by R. Coat in The Whole Doctrine qf Calvin about the Sabbath, and the Lord's Day, Edin. 1860). But while condemning everything which they viewed as abuses and corruptions, the reform ers never ceased to acknowledge the manifold utility and high importance of the Sunday as a day of rest, worship, and decorous enjoyment. Like the later fathers and the schoolmen also, they recognized in the fourth commandment a useful means of instruc tion and exhortation; but, as we have said, they utterly rejected it as a law. "The ten commandments," says Luther, "do not apply to U3 Gentiles and Christians, but only to the Jews." (On the Yen Commandments). " A law," says Grotius, " obliges only those to whom it is given; and to whom the Mosaic law is given, itself declares: Hear, 0 Israel.'" (be Jure Belli et Pads, lib. i. c. i. s. 16). He quotes also Dent. iv. 7, and Ps. cxlvii. 19,20. This is not antinomiauism (q.v.): the reformers acknowledged their sub jection not only to the more perfect law of Christ, but to that universal and perpetual law which Paul (Rota. ii. 14) speaks of as the light to the Gentiles of old, who, " not lowing the law, were a law unto .themselves, showing the work of the law written iu their hearts." See ETHICS.