The Dark Ages defined—Difficulty of tracing the people of God during this period—The Sabbath effectually suppressed in the Catholic church at the close of the fifth century—Sabbath-keepers in Rome about A. D. 600—The Culdees of Great Britain—Columba probably a Sabbath-keeper—The Waldenses—Their antiquity—Their wide extent—Their peculiarities—Sabbatarian character of a part of this people—Important facts respecting the Waldenses and the Romanists—Other bodies of Sabbatarians—The Cathari—The Arnoldistæ—The Passaginians—The Petrobruysians—Gregory VII. about A. D. 1074 condemns the Sabbath-keepers—The Sabbath in Constantinople in the eleventh century—A portion of the Anabaptists—Sabbatarians in Abyssinia and Ethiopia—The Armenians of the East Indies—The Sabbath retained through the Dark Ages by those who were not in the communion of the Romish church.
With the accession of the Roman bishop to supremacy began the Dark Ages;[864] and as he increased in strength, the gloom of darkness settled with increasing intensity upon the world. The highest elevation of the papal power marks the latest point in the Dark Ages before the first gray dawn of twilight.[865] That power was providentially weakened preparatory to the reformation of the sixteenth century, when the light of advancing day began to manifestly dissipate the gross darkness which covered the earth. The difficulty of tracing the true people of God through this period is well set forth in the following language of Benedict:—
“As scarcely any fragment of their history remains, all we know of them is from accounts of their enemies, which were always uttered in the style of censure and complaint; and without which we should not have known that millions of them ever existed. It was the settled policy of Rome to obliterate every vestige of opposition to her doctrines and decrees; everything heretical, whether persons or writings, by which the faithful would be liable to be contaminated and led astray. In conformity to this their fixed determination, all books and records of their opposers were hunted up and committed to the flames. Before the art of printing was discovered in the fifteenth century, all books were made with the pen; the copies, of course, were so few that their concealment was much more difficult than it would be now; and if a few of them escaped the vigilance of the inquisitors, they would soon be worn out and gone. None of them could be admitted and preserved in the public libraries of the Catholics, from the ravages of time and of the hands of barbarians with which all parts of Europe were at different periods overwhelmed.”[866]
The first five centuries of the Christian era accomplished the suppression of the Sabbath in those churches which were under the special control of the Roman pontiff. Thenceforward we must look for the observers of the Sabbath outside the communion of the church of Rome. It was predicted that the Roman power should cast down the truth to the ground.[867] The Scriptures set forth the law of God as his truth.[868] The Dark Ages were the result of this work of the great apostasy. So dense and all-pervading was the darkness, that God’s pure truth was more or less obscured even with the true people of God in their places of retirement.
About the year 600, as we have seen, there was in the city of Rome itself a class of Sabbath-keeping Christians who were very strict in the observance of the fourth commandment. It has been said of them that they joined with this a strict abstinence from labor on Sunday. But Dr. Twisse, a learned first-day writer who has particularly examined the record respecting them, asserts that this Sunday observance pertained to “other persons, different from the former.”[869] These Sabbath-keepers were not Romanists, and the pope denounced them in strong language.
The Christians of Great Britain, before the mission of Augustine to that country, A. D. 596, were not in subjection to the bishop of Rome. They were in an eminent degree Bible Christians. They are thus described:—
“The Scottish church, when it first meets the eye of civilization, is not Romish, nor even prelatical. When the monk Augustine, with his forty missionaries, in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy, came over to Britain under the auspices of Gregory, the bishop of Rome, to convert the barbarian Saxons, he found the northern part of the island already well-nigh filled with Christians and Christian institutions. These Christians were the Culdees, whose chief seat was the little island of Hi or Iona, on the western coast of Scotland. An Irish presbyter, Columba, feeling himself stirred with missionary zeal, and doubtless knowing the wretched condition of the savage Scots and Picts, in the year 565, took with him twelve other missionaries, and passed over to Scotland. They fixed their settlement on the little island just named, and from that point became the missionaries of all Scotland, and even penetrated into England.[870]
“The people in the south of England converted by Augustine and his assistants, and those in the north who had been won by Culdee labor, soon met, as Christian conquest advanced from both sides; and when they came together, it was soon seen that Roman and Culdee Christianity very decidedly differed in a great many respects. The Culdees, for the most part, had a simple and primitive form of Christianity, while Rome presented a vast accumulation of superstitions, and was arrayed in her well-known pomp.[871]
“The Culdee went to Iona that in quiet, with meditation, study, and prayer, he might fit himself for going out into the world as a missionary. Indeed, Iona was a great mission institute, where preachers were trained who evangelized the rude tribes of Scotland in a very short time. To have done such a work as this in less than half a century implies apostolic activity, purity, and success.[872]
“After the success of Agustine and his monks in England, the Culdees had shut themselves up within the limits of Scotland, and had resisted for centuries all the efforts of Rome to win them over. At last, however, they were overthrown by their own rulers.”[873]