Sacred unto the coming ages’ joys.”
Lines 51-53.
Here again we have an explicit testimony to the divine appointment of the seventh day to a holy use while man was yet in Eden, the garden of God. And this completes the testimony of the fathers to the time of Constantine and the Council of Nice.
One thing is everywhere open to the reader’s eye as he passes through these testimonies from the fathers: they lived in what may with propriety be called the age of apostatizing. The apostasy was not complete, but it was steadily developing itself. Some of the fathers had the Sabbath in the dust, and honored as their weekly festival the day of the sun, though claiming for it no divine authority. Others recognize the Sabbath as a divine institution which should be honored by all mankind in memory of the creation, and yet at the same time they exalt above it the festival of Sunday, which they acknowledge had nothing but custom and tradition for its support. The end may be foreseen: in due time the Sunday festival obtained the whole ground for itself, and the Sabbath was driven out. Several things conspired to accomplish this result:—
1. The Jews, who retained the ancient Sabbath, had slain Christ. It was easy for men to forget that Christ as Lord of the Sabbath had claimed it as his institution, and to call the Sabbath a Jewish institution which Christians should not regard.
2. The church of Rome as the chief in the work of apostasy took the lead in the earliest effort to suppress the Sabbath by turning it into a fast.
3. In the Christian church almost from the beginning men voluntarily honored the fourth, the sixth, and the first days of the week to commemorate the betrayal, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, acts of respect in themselves innocent enough.
4. But the first day of the week corresponded to the widely observed heathen festival of the sun, and it was therefore easy to unite the honor of Christ with the convenience and worldly advantage of his people, and to justify the neglect of the ancient Sabbath by stigmatizing it as a Jewish institution with which Christians should have no concern.
The progressive character of the work of apostasy with respect to the Sabbath is incidentally illustrated by what Giesler, the distinguished historian of the church, says of the Sabbath and first-day in his record of the first, the second, and the third century. Of the first century he says:—
“Whilst the Christians of Palestine, who kept the whole Jewish law, celebrated of course all the Jewish festivals, the heathen converts observed only the Sabbath, and, in remembrance of the closing scenes of our Saviour’s life, the passover (1 Cor. 5:6-8), though without the Jewish superstitions, Gal. 4:10; Col. 2:16. Besides these the Sunday as the day of our Saviour’s resurrection (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10), ἡ κυριακὴ ἡμέρα, was devoted to religious worship.”—Giesler’s Ecclesiastical History, vol. i. sect. 29, edition 1836.