Thus the fact is placed beyond all dispute that this decree gave full permission to all kinds of agricultural labor. The following testimony of Mosheim is therefore worthy of strict attention:—
“The first day of the week, which was the ordinary and stated time for the public assemblies of the Christians, was in consequence of a peculiar law enacted by Constantine, observed with greater solemnity than it had formerly been.”[730]
What will the advocates of first-day sacredness say to this? They quote Mosheim respecting Sunday observance in the first century—which testimony has been carefully examined in this work[731]—and they seem to think that his language in support of first-day sacredness is nearly equal in authority to the language of the New Testament; in fact, they regard it as supplying an important omission in that book. Yet Mosheim states respecting Constantine’s Sunday law, promulgated in the fourth century, which restrained merchants and mechanics, but allowed all kinds of agricultural labor on that day, that it caused the day to be “observed with greater solemnity than it had formerly been.” It follows, therefore, on Mosheim’s own showing, that Sunday, during the first three centuries, was not a day of abstinence from labor in the Christian church. On this point, Bishop Taylor thus testifies:—
“The primitive Christians did all manner of works upon the Lord’s day, even in the times of persecution, when they are the strictest observers of all the divine commandments; but in this they knew there was none; and therefore when Constantine the emperor had made an edict against working upon the Lord’s day, yet he excepts and still permitted all agriculture or labors of the husbandman whatsoever.”[732]
Morer tells us respecting the first three centuries, that is to say, the period before Constantine, that
“The Lord’s day had no command that it should be sanctified, but it was left to God’s people to pitch on this or that day for the public worship. And being taken up and made a day of meeting for religious exercises, yet for three hundred years there was no law to bind them to it, and for want of such a law, the day was not wholly kept in abstaining from common business; nor did they any longer rest from their ordinary affairs (such was the necessity of those times) than during the divine service.”[733]
And Sir Wm. Domville says:—
“Centuries of the Christian era passed away before the Sunday was observed by the Christian church as a Sabbath. History does not furnish us with a single proof or indication that it was at any time so observed previous to the Sabbatical edict of Constantine in A. D. 321.”[734]