Day is a Sabbath, or that it is to be observed Sabbatically, or that its observance depends on the fourth Commandment, or that the principle of the Sabbath is sufficiently carried out by one day in seven being consecrated to God. Whatever the Lord's Day had, was its own, not borrowed from the Sabbath, which was regarded for religious purposes as existing no longer. Nay more, when certain Judaizing persons had troubled the Church by insisting that the law of Moses was binding upon Gentile converts, the Apostles met in council. Their decision was that certain things should be abstained from by the Gentiles, but they did not enjoin any positive ceremonial observance connected with the older Covenant, not even the Sabbath. And to this it should be added, that St. Paul in writing to the Colossians, (ii. 16), to the effect, that "the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us," was "blotted out by Christ," "taken out of the way by Him," and "nailed by Him to His cross,' subjoins this remarkable exemplification of his meaning: "Let no man, therefore, judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ." In writing to the Galatians, (iv. 9, 10), he says, in like manner, "Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.”

No testimony can be more decisive than this to the fact that the Sabbath was of obligation no longer.

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It has been urged here, that St. Paul is speaking only of the Sabbath as it existed among the Jews, or of their Sabbatical observances of which the Sabbath was only one, but that he did not intend to annul a Sabbath of more venerable antiquity, whose origin dates from the Creation. This is of course to assume a point which will be discussed hereafter, that the Sabbath existed as a practical ordinance before the time of Moses, and has claims upon us anterior to the Mosaical Law, and is not abolished with that law's abolition. At present I will merely say, this is only an assumption.

It has been urged again, that among the things to come was the Lord's Day, and that the Sabbath, the shadow of it, virtually subsists in the Lord's Day.89 This is to assume the whole point at issue, and, as we shall show hereafter by the authority of Scripture and by other great though subordinate authorities, to mistake the typical object of the Sabbath.

It has been urged thirdly, that to adduce these passages is to prove too much; that they make the observance of all days, whether Christian or Jewish,90 either to be directly wrong, or to be a matter of indifference. This will be discussed also in its proper place.

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Many passages, no doubt, occur in the Acts of the Apostles in which mention is made of the Sabbath. SS. Paul and Barnabas enter into the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia on the Sabbath Day. St. Paul speaks there of the prophets being read every Sabbath Day, in the course of his address to the people. He is asked to preach the same words to them on the next Sabbath. On the next Sabbath" he complies with this request. At Corinth he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath. At Philippi he resorted on the Sabbath to a Proseucha or Synagogue-chapel by the river-side. At Thessalonica he reasoned three Sabbath Days out of the Scriptures. But why was the Sabbath thus selected ? 92 Simply because the persons to be converted in the first instance were Jews; because the Jews assembled on the Sabbath Day; and because, being assembled, they had those Scriptures before them out of which the preachers of the Gospel were to prove that He had come which should come. The Sabbath is only mentioned naturally and in the course of the narrative as the Day on which the Jews could be approached and were approached in masses. Not one word is said by St. Paul or by any of the Apostles in honor of the day, or in commendation of its observance. It is curious too that though at the Council of Jerusalem St. James used the expression, "Moses is read in the Synagogue every Sabbath Day," and thus incidentally brought the subject before it, it

was not thought desirable to place the observance of that Day even among the matters which should be conceded to Jewish prepossessions. Accordingly, though the Jewish converts still observed it, though even St. Paul, perhaps, observed it occasionally, following the same rule of charitable allowance for his brethren's scruples that he did when he purified himself after the Jewish manner, and even circumcised Timothy, the son of a Jewish mother, and though, as we shall see presently, it dragged on a lingering existence for some time by the side of the Lord's Day, I think that the following propositions are at least tolerably clear;

That the Lord's Day, (a festival on the first day in each week), is indicated in the New Testament, and was observed by the Apostles and their immediate followers as distinct from the Sabbath, (a Jewish festival on the seventh day in each week), the obligation to observe which is denied both expressly and by implication in the New Testament. That being so acknowledged and observed by the Apostles and their immediate followers, it is of Divine institution, and so, in its essence, and in the circumstantials of it mentioned in Scripture, binding on the Church for ever.

I have said, that these propositions are tolerably clear. They will, I think, be proved to demonstration by notices to be found in writers of the next two centuries.93 From these it will appear that, as a matter of fact, in all places where

Christianity was known, the same doctrine prevailed on this subject, not as requiring proof, but as a point which no one so much as thought of disputing.

Whether some moral consideration, which the Mosaical Law did not furnish for the first time, and which therefore survived its abolition, did not, from the nature of the case, constitute a reason for the institution of the Lord's Day which we are justified in finding if we can; and whether again the Mosaic law, as one development of that moral consideration, was not as in other matters, so in this, suggestive of something connected with it, are points which I reserve for the present. So far as we have gone, the external character of the Lord's Day at the close of the first century appears to be that of a positive institution of the New Dispensation. It is a day of Christian assembling at short periodic intervals of time, on which certain duties to God, to a man's self, and to his neighbours were performed. This positive institution would seem, both in its essence and in the circumstantials which we have found attached to it, to possess whatever of Divine sanction origination by inspired Apostles can bestow. As a matter of fact the interval between one Lord's Day and another is of the same length as that between one Sabbath and another. But nothing Sabbatical, either in the sense of commanded rest, (though rest to a certain extent would be a necessary con