“Wherefore as they [the Jews] rejected it [the Sabbath law] the Word [Christ], by the new covenant, translated 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 [day] of the light, in which the Saviour of the world, after all his labors among men, obtained the victory over death, and passed the portals of Heaven, having achieved a work superior to the six-days’ creation.”[758]
“On this day, which is the first [day] of light and of the true Sun, we assemble, after an interval of six days, and celebrate holy and spiritual Sabbaths, even all nations redeemed by him throughout the world, and do those things according to the spiritual law, which were decreed for the priests to do on the Sabbath.”[759]
“And all things whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s day, as more appropriately belonging to it, because it has a precedence and is first in rank, and more honorable than the Jewish Sabbath.”[760]
Eusebius was under the strongest temptation to please and even to flatter Constantine; for he lived in the sunshine of imperial favor. On one occasion, he went so far as to say that the city of Jerusalem, which Constantine had rebuilt, might be the New Jerusalem predicted in the prophecies![761] But perhaps there was no act of Eusebius that could give Constantine greater pleasure than his publication of such doctrine as this respecting the change of the Sabbath. The emperor had, by the civil law, given to Sunday a Sabbatical character. Though he had done this while yet a heathen, he found it to his interest to maintain this law after he obtained a commanding position in the Catholic church. When, therefore, Eusebius came out and declared that Christ transferred the Sabbath to Sunday, a doctrine never before heard of, and in support of which he had no Scripture to quote, Constantine could not but feel in the highest degree flattered that his own Sabbatical edict pertained to the very day which Christ had ordained to be the Sabbath in place of the seventh. It was a convincing proof that Constantine was divinely called to his high position in the Catholic church, that he should thus exactly identify his work with that of Christ, though he had no knowledge at the time that Christ had done any work of the kind.
As no writer before Eusebius had ever hinted at the doctrine of the change of the Sabbath, and as there is the most convincing proof, as we have shown, that before his time Sunday possessed no Sabbatic character, and as Eusebius does not claim that this doctrine is asserted in the Scriptures, nor in any preceding ecclesiastical writer, it is certain that he was the father of the doctrine. This new doctrine was not put forth without some motive. That motive could not have been to bring forward some neglected passages of the Scriptures; for he does not quote a single text in its support. But the circumstances of the case plainly reveal the motive. The new doctrine was exactly adapted to the new order of things introduced by Constantine. It was, moreover, peculiarly suited to flatter that emperor’s pride, the very thing which Eusebius was under the strongest temptation to do.
It is remarkable, however, that Eusebius, in the very connection in which he announces this new doctrine, unwittingly exposes its falsity. He first asserts that Christ changed the Sabbath, and then virtually contradicts it by indicating the real authors of the change. Thus he says:—
“All things whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s day.”[762]
The persons here referred to as the authors of this work are the Emperor Constantine, and such bishops as Eusebius, who loved the favor of princes, and Sylvester, the pretended successor of Saint Peter. Two facts refute the assertion of Eusebius that Christ changed the Sabbath: 1. That Eusebius, who lived three hundred years after the alleged change, is the first man who mentions such change; 2. That Eusebius testifies that himself and others made this change, which they could not have done had Christ made it at the beginning. But though the doctrine of the change of the Sabbath was thus announced by Eusebius, it was not seconded by any writer of that age. The doctrine had never been heard of before, and Eusebius had simply his own assertion, but no passage of the Holy Scriptures to offer in its support.
But after Constantine, the Sabbath began to recover strength, at least in the eastern churches. Prof. Stuart, in speaking of the period from Constantine to the council of Laodicea, A. D. 364, says:—
“The practice of it [the keeping of the Sabbath] was continued by Christians who were jealous for the honor of the Mosaic law, and finally became, as we have seen, predominant throughout Christendom. It was supposed at length that the fourth commandment did require the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath (not merely a seventh part of time), and reasoning as Christians of the present day are wont to do, viz., that all which belonged to the ten commandments was immutable and perpetual, the churches in general came gradually to regard the seventh-day Sabbath as altogether sacred.”[763]