The influence of Constantine powerfully contributed to the aid of those church leaders who were intent upon bringing the forms of pagan worship into the Christian church. Gibbon thus places upon record the motives of these men, and the result of their action:—
“The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstition of paganism, if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire: but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.”[755]
The body of nominal Christians, which resulted from this strange union of pagan rites with Christian worship, arrogated to itself the title of Catholic church, while the true people of God, who resisted these dangerous innovations, were branded as heretics, and cast out of the church. It is not strange that the Sabbath should lose ground in such a body, in its struggle with its rival, the festival of the sun. Indeed, after a brief period, the history of the Sabbath will be found only in the almost obliterated records of those whom the Catholic church cast out and stigmatized as heretics. Of the Sabbath in Constantine’s time, Heylyn says:—
“As for the Saturday, that retained its wonted credit in the eastern churches, little inferior to the Lord’s day, if not plainly equal; not as a Sabbath, think not so; but as a day designed unto sacred meetings.”[756]
There is no doubt that, after the great flood of worldliness which entered the church at the time of Constantine’s pretended conversion, and after all that was done by himself and by Sylvester in behalf of Sunday, the observance of the Sabbath became, with many, only a nominal thing. But the action of the council of Laodicea, to which we shall presently come, proves conclusively that the Sabbath was still observed, not simply as a festival, as Heylyn would have it, but as a day of abstinence from labor, as enjoined in the commandment. The work of Constantine, however, marks an epoch in the history of the Sabbath and of Sunday. Constantine was hostile to the Sabbath, and his influence told powerfully against it with all those who sought worldly advancement. The historian Eusebius was the special friend and eulogist of Constantine. This fact should not be overlooked in weighing his testimony concerning the Sabbath. He speaks of it as follows:—
“They [the patriarchs] did not, therefore, regard circumcision, nor observe the Sabbath, nor do we; neither do we abstain from certain foods, nor regard other injunctions, which Moses subsequently delivered to be observed in types and symbols, because such things as these do not belong to Christians.”[757]
This testimony shows precisely the views of Constantine and the imperial party relative to the Sabbath. But it does not give the views of Christians as a whole; for we have seen that the Sabbath had been extensively retained up to this point, and we shall soon have occasion to quote other historians, the cotemporaries and successors of Eusebius, who record its continued observance. Constantine exerted a controlling influence in the church, and was determined to “have nothing in common with that most hostile rabble of the Jews.” Happy would it have been had his aversion been directed against the festivals of the heathen rather than against the Sabbath of the Lord.
Before Constantine’s time, there is no trace of the doctrine of the change of the Sabbath. On the contrary, we have decisive evidence that Sunday was a day on which ordinary labor was considered lawful and proper. But Constantine, while yet a heathen, commanded that every kind of business excepting agriculture should be laid aside on that day. His law designated the day as a heathen festival, which it actually was. But within four years after its enactment, Constantine had become, not merely a professed convert to the Christian religion, but, in many respects, practically the head of the church, as the course of things at the council of Nicea plainly showed. His heathen Sunday law, being unrevoked, was thenceforward enforced in behalf of that day as a Christian festival. This law gave to the Sunday festival, for the first time, something of a Sabbatic character. It was now a rest-day from most kinds of business by the law of the Roman Empire. God’s rest-day was thenceforward more in the way than ever before.
But now we come to a fact of remarkable interest. The way having been prepared, as we have just seen, for the doctrine of the change of the Sabbath, and the circumstances of the case demanding its production, it was at this very point brought forward for the first time. Eusebius, the special friend and flatterer of Constantine, was the man who first put forth this doctrine. In his “Commentary on the Psalms,” he makes the following statement on Psalm xcii. respecting the change of the Sabbath:—