for our purpose. And we will add that with many of these conclusions we heartily concur, though on some of them we should be tempted, if time permitted, to offer a few remarks. But we must confine ourselves to one point, the most important perhaps of all, the extent to which the Lord's day must be regarded as resting on Apostolical (and thus far on Divine) authority. Here we are very much at issue with Dr. Hessey.

That Christians should assemble themselves together for united worship, for mutual edification, and for the special rite which testifies and cements their communion, is indeed plainly and repeatedly enjoined not only by the Apostles, but by Christ himself. But with this we believe that all positive direction ceases on the part of Christ and of his authorised messengers. It is obvious, at any rate, that no definite rule is expressly laid down by them; and if we are to deduce any such rule, we must deduce it from general principles, confirmed or aided by mere incidental hints.

Now Dr. Hessey's theory appears to us to involve the paradoxical assumption that though Jewish Sabbaths were abolished by the Christian religion, yet Jewish weeks, notwithstanding, were made of universal obligation. Such a proposition, nakedly stated, must be seen to carry its own refutation with it. Yet we cannot understand how Dr. Hessey can avoid making this postulate, if his conclusion is to hold good.

For let it be considered how far general principles would conduct us without it. That the fulfilment of the duty of united worship would require the observance of stated days, marked out by preconcerted arrangement, is a necessity inherent in joint action on the part of all communities except the very smallest. That the law by which such days are fixed should also be a law of orderly and regular recurrence, though not a matter of absolute necessity, still is one suggested both by sound reason and by the common instincts of our nature. But what necessity, what ground of reason or of instinct, would make the septenary principle the rule of this recurrence? Here is the weak point in Dr. Hessey's case. He has conceded the point that Sabbaths and everything connected with them passed away with the Jewish dispensation: yet he would have us believe that the Sabbatical calendar was either assumed as an universal necessity, or authoritatively imposed on all men, by the Apostles. This is far too much to take for granted If, indeed, the hebdomadal cycle were one inherent in the course of nature, or commending itself to the human mind by its essential fitness—even if it had been already adopted by general consent at the time we speak of, so as to offer a point of contact which

Christianity might have fastened on with advantage, we could understand the conclusions to which Dr. Hessey would lead us. But it is obvious that none of these conditions are met by the facts of the case. That the hebdomadal cycle is not imposed on men by any physical necessity is still more clear than that natural phenomena very readily suggest it. It is needless to argue this point further. Nor again, does any tolerably informed man suppose for a moment, that, at the time of the promulgation of the Gospel, it was in general or ordinary use. Even in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, custom seems to have fluctuated, as conflicting influences might determine, between the use of the Greek Calendar and that of the Latin. Neither of these, as every one knows, was based on the septenary principle or was even compatible with it. The Greek month of thirty days, not only among the Athenians but in its other local varieties, proceeded on the obvious and convenient arrangement of a threefold division into decades. The Roman month had its more complicated arrangement, ruled by Calends, Nones, and Ides; and side by side with this, in the rural districts of Italy, subsisted the old Etruscan system of Nundines. In all this there was nothing to facilitate the introduction of a seventh day festival: nothing to sustain the computation of it, and to give it currency and meaning. Imposed upon a purely Gentile community such a festival would have entailed an embarrassing disarrangement of ideas, as well as many practical inconveniences. That the Apostles should have enjoined such an observance upon such communities is inconceivable except on Sabbatarian grounds; and these grounds Dr. Hessey has agreed, (and, as we think, has most justly agreed) to abandon.

But dismissing à priori considerations, we turn to the passages in the New Testament which bear upon this subject. Dr. Hessey sees in these texts a sure indication of what was the practice of the Apostles themselves, and also of the churches which they governed. We waive for a moment the several questions which have been raised upon each of these texts by the long series of Commentators, from Origen to Calvin, and from Calvin to Alford. But granting the utmost which is claimed in every case, what do they prove? Merely that the first day of the week was specially observed by Jewish Christians, and by other churches which had been formed on a nucleus either of Jews or Jewish proselytes; and to whom therefore the idea of weeks was already familiar and habitual. It is impossible to deduce from this the practice of churches distinctively Gentile; still less the principle by which that practice was necessarily to be determined. To establish such conclusions

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the appeal must be made to documents addressed to Gentiles only. Now (whatever doubt may attach to some other Epistles) we have one Epistle at least of St. Paul's to a church purely Gentile, not only in origin, but in culture,-the Church of the Colossians. And it is a fact of no small significance, as proving his estimate of such arrangements as we speak of, that he writes to them: Let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or in re"spect 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.' (ii. 16, 17.) Nor is it less significant that in writing even to two churches nurtured in Judaism, or deeply imbued with it, and which therefore would naturally and allowably shape their institutions by a Jewish mould, he yet guards earnestly against the conversion of such matters into essentials. To the Roman Christians, who from their position at the centre of social and political life needed most especially both to understand and to exemplify the large free spirit of Christianity, he writes: One man esteemeth one day above another; another ' esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it to 'the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord 'he doth not regard it.' (xiv. 5, 6.); while to the Galatians, under the peculiar apprehensions he entertained for them, he writes in language which seems almost to condemn the practice which elsewhere he approves as laudable: Ye observe days and months and times and years. I am afraid of you 'lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.' (iv. 10, 11.)

6

We complain of Dr. Hessey for making no distinction in his quotations and discussions between the churches of Jewish and those of Gentile culture; disregarding here one of the plainest and most useful principles which modern criticism has established. We do not of course deny that it was desirable and advantageous for the Christian Church to attain to agreement and uniformity in respect of a day of worship; nor that it was right and fitting that the elder or Jewish branch should gradually draw the rest to adopt its hereditary method. And so it came to pass. Whatever may have been the varieties of practice, actual or potential, among the scattered communities of the Apostolic age, there can be no doubt that the observance of the Lord's day in the hebdomadal cycle soon became universal in the Christian body. It was well that this should be so, union and stability being thus the more insured to the Church, though in this as in many other points the Judaizing element gained more power than Christian truth would sanction.

Meanwhile the heathen world by a singular, and as we may

believe a providential process, was being prepared for the acceptance of the same hebdomadal cycle, and thus for opening a new approach to Christianity. By the end of the second century the septenary division of time was forcing its way into general adoption throughout the Roman Empire; and this through the agency of influences for the most part neither Christian nor even Jewish. We wish that Dr. Hessey had dwelt more particularly on this strange episode of history. Dion Cassius, in the well-known passage which he quotes, (Hist. Rom. xxxvii. 18.) is our principal authority for the fact, and its explanation; and he expressly classes the seven-days week amongst Egyptian institutions, and ascribes its establishment among the Romans to Egyptian influences. For the main fact, at any rate, his testimony seems conclusive; nor can he well have been mistaken in tracing the new mode of reckoning to Egypt in the first place, though we are convinced by Archdeacon Hare (in the Philological Museum,' vol. i.) that the Egyptians themselves had probably received the seven-days week from the Chaldæans together with the science of astrology. We know from numberless sources what enormous progress Egyptian religious ideas and customs had been making among the Romans for some time previously; and the fact is easily explained. Amidst the general concourse of races and creeds under the Roman Empire, held together as it was by nothing but the iron despotism which extinguished at the same time all true patriotic feeling, special and traditionary customs (more particularly those which were connected with political institutions) lost their power over men's minds, as did also the ancient forms of their discredited national mythologies. Men yearned for something more universal and more natural. To those who were incapable of philosophy, astrology and the mysteries seemed to promise what they wanted. The massive and mystic ideas of the Eastern religions (which had partially survived even through the old mythology in such mysteries as those of Eleusis) possessed a strong fascination for them, and above all the venerable and awful forms of Egyptian worship. The rites

of Isis and Serapis, the licentiousness of which was, we believe, but a secondary recommendation, exercised that attraction upon the coarser and more superstitious minds which purer spirits felt in the Eastern Monotheistic systems, and above all in Christianity. Hence, too, the general exchange of local calendars which had become discordant and inconvenient, (especially since Julius Cæsar's 'year of confusion,' and Hadrian's subsequent patronage of the Greek mode,) and which no longer had patriotic feeling or political associations to recommend them, for

the simpler system of recurrent weeks and week days, with its quasi-natural basis and its astrological associations. Hence also that growing reverence for the Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun, or Sunday, which Constantine, as we shall see, employed some time later for the furtherance of his purposes. By the end of the third century, the adoption of the astrological week, with its seven planetary days, had become, it would seem, almost universal. It would be an interesting task, and one not fully executed even by Selden, to trace the growth of this usage by a searching examination of the writers, heathen and Christian, of the second and third centuries. That it had taken deep root, before the christianisation of the Empire, not only among all the subject nations, but even among the neighbouring tribes, we have a proof, beyond all incidental notices on the part of contemporary writers, in the names of the days of the week permanently impressed alike on the Romance and on the Teutonic languages of Europe.

It was, however, not till the famous decree of Constantine (A.D.321) that Sunday, by becoming an authorised and constituted holiday, grew to be associated in the minds of Christians with rest as well as worship. Dr. Hessey follows the best authorities in believing that this decree neither involved nor implied a profession of the Christian faith on the Emperor's part; but, while eminently favourable to Christianity, gave him the opportunity of establishing an institution which would be no less acceptable to his heathen subjects, and a bond of union between all. From this time forward the complex elements which go to make up the popular idea of Sunday among Christians were left to blend together, varying indeed in the degree of their combination among different nations and in different centuries, yet exhibiting in the main the same features as at present, although sometimes one feature was brought into greater prominence, and sometimes another.

We have thus traced the history of the institution to that point from which we started at first; though many episodes remain, some of which are agreeably touched upon in Dr. Hessey's book. We again recommend the book very strongly to the notice of the public, and more especially of the clergy. If the observations we have ventured to make, and the arguments of the Bampton lecturer, appear to some to savour of dangerous novelty, we answer that they are in great measure simply a recurrence to the principles of the Reformers and the Fathers, not to say of the Bible also. It is with great satisfaction, therefore, that we point in conclusion to the words of an ancient Christian writer, now usually classed among the