“Now we exhort you, brethren and fellow-servants, to avoid vain talk and obscene discourses, and jestings, drunkenness, lasciviousness, luxury, unbounded passions, with foolish discourses, since we do not permit you so much as on the Lord’s days, which are days of joy, to speak or act anything unseemly.”[599]
This language plainly implies that the so-called Lord’s day was a day of greater mirth than the other days of the week. Even on the Lord’s day they must not speak or act anything unseemly, though it is evident that their license on that day was greater than on other days. Once more these “Constitutions” give us the nature of Sunday observance: “Every Sabbath day excepting one, and every Lord’s day hold your solemn assemblies, and rejoice; for he will be guilty of sin who fasts on the Lord’s day.”[600] But no one can read so much as once that “he is guilty of sin who performs work on this day.”
Next, we quote the epistle to the Magnesians in its longer form, which though not written by Ignatius was actually written about the time that the Apostolical Constitutions were committed to writing. Here are the words of this epistle:—
“And after the observance of the Sabbath, let every friend of Christ keep the Lord’s day as a festival, the resurrection day, the queen and chief of all the days.”[601]
The writer of the Syriac Documents concerning Edessa comes last, and he defines the services of Sunday as follows: “On the first [day] of the week, let there be service, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the oblation.”[602] These are all the passages in the writings of the first three centuries which describe early first-day observance. Let the reader judge whether we have correctly stated the nature of that observance. Next we invite attention to the several reasons offered by these fathers for celebrating the festival of Sunday.
The reputed epistle of Barnabas supports the Sunday festival by saying that it was the day “on which Jesus rose again from the dead,” and it intimates that it prefigures the eighth thousand years, when God shall create the world anew.[603]
Justin Martyr has four reasons:—
1. “It is the first day on which God having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world.”[604]
2. “Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.”[605]
3. “It is possible for us to show how the eighth day possessed a certain mysterious import, which the seventh day did not possess, and which was promulgated by God through these rites,”[606] i. e., through circumcision.