Further legislation being necessary, we are told:—
“About a year forward, there was a council at Narbon, which forbid all persons of what country or quality soever, to do any servile work on the Lord’s day. But if any man presumed to disobey this canon he was to be fined if a freeman, and if a servant, severely lashed. Or as Surius represents the penalty in the edict of King Recaredus, which he put out, near the same time to strengthen the decrees of the council, ‘Rich men were to be punished with the loss of a moiety of their estates, and the poorer sort with perpetual banishment,’ in the year of grace 590. Another synod was held at Auxerre a city in Champain, in the reign of Clotair king of France, where it was decreed ... ‘that no man should be allowed to plow, nor cart, or do any such thing on the Lord’s day.’”[800]
Such were some of the efforts made in the sixth century to advance the sacredness of the Sunday festival. And Morer tells us that,
“For fear the doctrine should not take without miracles to support it, Gregory of Tours [about A. D. 590] furnishes us with several to that purpose.”[801]
Mr. Francis West, an English first-day writer, gravely adduces one of these miracles in support of first-day sacredness:—
“Gregory of Tours reporteth, ‘that a husbandman, who upon the Lord’s day went to plough his field, as he cleansed his plough with an iron, the iron stuck so fast in his hand that for two years he could not be delivered from it, but carried it about continually, to his exceeding great pain and shame.’”[802]
In the conclusion of the sixth century, Pope Gregory exhorted the people of Rome to “expiate on the day of our Lord’s resurrection what was remissly done for the six days before.”[803] In the same epistle, this pope condemned a class of men at Rome who advocated the strict observance of both the Sabbath and the Sunday, styling them the preachers of Antichrist.[804] This shows the intolerant feeling of the papacy toward the Sabbath, even when joined with the strict observance of Sunday. It also shows that there were Sabbath-keepers even in Rome itself as late as the seventh century; although so far bewildered by the prevailing darkness that they joined with its observance a strict abstinence from labor on Sunday.
In the early part of the seventh century arose another foe to the Bible Sabbath in the person of Mahomet. To distinguish his followers alike from those who observed the Sabbath and those who observed the festival of Sunday, he selected Friday, the sixth day of the week, as their religious festival. And thus “the Mahometans and the Romanists crucified the Sabbath, as the Jews and the Romans did the Lord of the Sabbath, between two thieves, the sixth and first day of the week.”[805] For Mahometanism and Romanism each suppressed the Sabbath over a wide extent of territory. About the middle of the seventh century, we have further canons of the church in behalf of Sunday:—
“At Chalons, a city in Burgundy, about the year 654, there was a provincial synod which confirmed what had been done by the third council of Orleans, about the observation of the Lord’s day, namely that ‘none should plow or reap, or do any other thing belonging to husbandry, on pain of the censures of the church; which was the more minded, because backed with the secular power, and by an edict menacing such as offended herein; who if bondmen, were to be soundly beaten, but if free, had three admonitions, and then if faulty, lost the third part of their patrimony, and if still obstinate were made slaves for the future. And in the first year of Eringius, about the time of Pope Agatho there sat the twelfth council of Toledo in Spain, A. D. 681, where the Jews were forbid to keep their own festivals, but so far at least observe the Lord’s day as to do no manner of work on it, whereby they might express their contempt of Christ or his worship.’”[806]
These were weighty reasons indeed for Sunday observance. Nor can it be thought strange that in the Dark Ages a constant succession of such things should eventuate in the universal observance of that day. Even the Jews were to be compelled to desist from Sabbath observance, and to honor Sunday by resting on that day from their labor. The earliest mention of Sunday in English statutes appears to be the following:—