“They who theorize respecting numbers, honor the number ten as the parent of all the others, and as imparting perfection to the human nativity. For my own part, I prefer viewing this measure of time in reference to God, as if implying that the ten months rather initiated man into the ten commandments; so that the numerical estimate of the time needed to consummate our natural birth should correspond to the numerical classification of the rules of our regenerate life.”[668]
In showing the deep guilt involved in the violation of the seventh commandment, Tertullian speaks of the sacredness of the commandments which precede it, naming several of them in particular, and among them the fourth, and then says of the precept against adultery that
It stands “in the very forefront of the most holy law, among the primary counts of the celestial edict.”[669]
Clement of Rome, or rather the author whose works have been ascribed to this father, speaks thus of the decalogue as a test:—
“On account of those, therefore, who, by neglect of their own salvation, please the evil one, and those who, by study of their own profit, seek to please the good One, ten things have been prescribed as a test to this present age, according to the number of the ten plagues which were brought upon Egypt.”[670]
Novatian, who wrote about A. D. 250, is accounted the founder of the sect called Cathari or Puritans. He wrote a treatise on the Sabbath, which is not extant. There is no reference to Sunday in any of his writings. He makes the following striking remarks concerning the moral law:—
“The law was given to the children of Israel for this purpose, that they might profit by it, and return to those virtuous manners which, although they had received them from their fathers, they had corrupted in Egypt by reason of their intercourse with a barbarous people. Finally, also, those ten commandments on the tables teach nothing new, but remind them of what had been obliterated—that righteousness in them, which had been put to sleep, might revive again as it were by the afflatus of the law, after the manner of a fire [nearly extinguished].”[671]
It is evident that in the judgment of Novatian, the ten commandments enjoined nothing that was not sacredly regarded by the patriarchs before Jacob went down into Egypt. It follows, therefore, that, in his opinion, the Sabbath was made, not at the fall of the manna, but when God sanctified the seventh day, and that holy men from the earliest ages observed it.
The Apostolical Constitutions, written about the third century, give us an understanding of what was widely regarded in the third century as apostolic doctrine. They speak thus of the ten commandments:—
“Have before thine eyes the fear of God, and always remember the ten commandments of God,—to love the one and only Lord God with all thy strength; to give no heed to idols, or any other beings, as being lifeless gods, or irrational beings or dæmons.”[672]