“Paula, with the women, as soon as they returned home on the Lord’s day, they sat down severally to their work, and made clothes for themselves and others.”[774]
Morer justifies this Sunday labor in the following terms:—
“If we read they did any work on the Lord’s day, it is to be remembered that this application to their daily tasks was not till their worship was quite over, when they might with innocency enough resume them, because the length of time or the number of hours assigned for piety was not then so well explained as in after ages. The state of the church is vastly different from what it was in those early days. Christians then for some centuries of years were under persecution and poverty; and besides their own wants, they had many of them severe masters who compelled them to work, and made them bestow less time in spiritual matters than they otherwise would. In St. Jerome’s age their condition was better, because Christianity had got into the throne as well as into the empire. Yet for all this, the entire sanctification of the Lord’s day proceeded slowly: and that it was the work of time to bring it to perfection, appears from the several steps the church made in her constitutions, and from the decrees of emperors and other princes, wherein the prohibitions from servile and civil business advanced by degrees from one species to another, till the day had got a considerable figure in the world. Now, therefore, the case being so much altered, the most proper use of citing those old examples is only, in point of doctrine, to show that ordinary work, as being a compliance with providence for the support of natural life, is not sinful even on the Lord’s day, when necessity is loud, and the laws of that church and nation where we live are not against it. This is what the first Christians had to say for themselves, in the works they did on that day. And if those works had been then judged a prophanation of the festival, I dare believe, they would have suffered martyrdom rather than been guilty.”[775]
The bishop of Ely thus testifies:—
“In St Jerome’s days, and in the very place where he was residing, the devoutest Christians did ordinarily work upon the Lord’s day, when the service of the church was ended.”[776]
St. Augustine, the cotemporary of Jerome, gives a synopsis of the argument in that age for Sunday observance, in the following words:—
“It appears from the sacred Scriptures, that this day was a solemn one; it was the first day of the age, that is of the existence of our world; in it the elements of the world were formed; on it the angels were created; on it Christ rose also from the dead; on it the Holy Spirit descended from Heaven upon the apostles as manna had done in the wilderness. For these and other such circumstances the Lord’s day is distinguished; and therefore the holy doctors of the church have decreed that all the glory of the Jewish Sabbath is transferred to it. Let us therefore keep the Lord’s day as the ancients were commanded to do the Sabbath.”[777]
It is to be observed that Augustine does not assign among his reasons for first-day observance, the change of the Sabbath by Christ or his apostles, or that the apostles observed that day, or that John had given it the name of Lord’s day. These modern first-day arguments were unknown to Augustine. He gave the credit of the work, not to Christ or his inspired apostles, but to the holy doctors of the church, who, of their own accord, had transferred the glory of the ancient Sabbath to the venerable day of the sun. The first day of the week was considered in the fifth century the most proper day for giving holy orders, that is, for ordinations, and about the middle of this century, says Heylyn,
“A law [was] made by Leo then Pope of Rome, and generally since taken up in the western church, that they should be conferred upon no day else.”[778]
According to Dr. Justin Edwards, this same pope made also this decree in behalf of Sunday:—