standing on the Sabbath; nor, secondly, are there any imperial laws forbidding lawsuits and pleadings on this day; nor, thirdly, any laws prohibiting the public shows and games, as on the Lord's Day; nor, fourthly, any laws obliging men to abstain wholly from bodily labour." 1 The views and practice of Christians, as respected the Saturday, therefore, did not amount to a want of unanimity in reference to the exclusive claim of the Lord's Day to Divine authority, and peculiar sacredness. The facts bear out the statement of Archbishop Ussher, that "where Saturday was kept holy day, it was not as a Sabbath, but as a preparation-day for the Christian Sabbath."

The literary conflicts of the Christians and Pagans, in reference to the Lord's Day, afford few materials of remark. In the first instance the persecutions of the Church, and then her ascendency in the Roman Empire, went to preclude, in a great measure, the strife of words. It appears that so late as the beginning of the fifth century, Pagan poetry shot some envenomed shafts at the Christians on account of their weekly holy day, though under the pretence of aiming them at the so-called and less-dreaded Jews.2 At an earlier period, the heathen assailed the Christian ritual as contemptibly mean, and the Christian Sabbath as a season devoted to concealed impurity and crime. The charges of immorality, as practised on the Lord's Day by its friends, were triumphantly disproved. Justin Martyr and Tertullian present unvarnished accounts of the harmless and holy manner in which the Christians passed the day. The latter, and Minucius Felix, turn the weapons of their enemies against themselves, for which the flagrant and shameless profligacy of paganism furnished ample occasion. The groundless allegation of Celsus, that the religion of Jesus was without a proper worship, because it had no altars, images, or temples, was met and disposed of by overpowering arguments in one of the ablest works of Origen, but for whose

1 Antiq. Book xx. c. 3. sec. 3.

• Thus wrote Rutilius Numitianus,

Radix stultitiæ cui frigida Sabbata cordi :
Sed cor frigidius religione sua est.

Septima quæque dies turpi damnata veterno
Tanquam lassati mollis imago Dei.

immortal pages the allegation itself must have been long ago forgotten.

Although no important discussion between Christians and unbelievers on the subject appears to have arisen in the period from the seventh century down to the time of the Reformation, and Sabbatic memorials were transferred for the most part to the canons of councils and the edicts of princes, to the abridgment of the literature of the question, yet the institution still employed the pens of the learned, and their testimony was of no little consequence to its preservation, as well as to the permanent evidence on its behalf. Many councils and synods directed their attention to the institution, and issued injunctions for its observance. It was the subject of frequent and uniformly favourable legislation by the civil powers. The dignitaries of the Church, particularly in England, exerted their commanding authority in their respective dioceses on its behalf. Even among the Popes, a few, awed by its sanctity, took its part. Such means, mixed up though they were in many instances with superstitious, and other impure ingredients, were the tributes of human reason and conscience to the sacred claims of the weekly rest, and helped to secure its preservation, with some measure of its hallowing and humanizing influence, during fifteen centuries. But a peculiar honour and interest attach to the men of those times, whether in higher or lower station, who breathed and shed around them the benignant spirit of the Divine institute, and to whom it owed, as to persons of the same character it will ever owe, its most congenial testimony, and best defence.

But, though the harmony of Christians on points directly affecting the authority and sacredness of the Lord's Day continued unbroken for upwards of fifteen centuries, and the Reformation itself, which stirred so many questions, led to no immediate contest on this, yet on a practice allied to the weekly day of rest, and tending to its wrong and injury, Rome and the Reformers were speedily at issue.

HOLIDAYS.

From an early time piety and zeal, by adding to the institu

tions of Heaven, began, unwittingly, to prepare the way for further errors and future strife. In these feelings originated the appointment of stated days for the commemoration of particular events

in the history of the Saviour. other class of sacred seasons. a3 "the day of birth to a worthy of grateful celebration. To ceremonies without Divine rule there was no limit. The saints entitled to the honour of commemoration amounted, in the course of some centuries, to a multitude for each day of the year,1 and the annual holidays of man became more numerous than the Sabbathdays of God. Self-righteousness soon converted the invention and observance of new ceremonies into the price of salvation. Ambition saw in these things the means of promoting its objects; and the more surely to compass them, gradually withdrew the light of knowledge, while it ministered fresh fuel to the flame of superstition and fanaticism. Rome, holding in words the supremacy of the Lord's Day, indirectly impaired its authority and influence by ranking it with her own holidays, and by imposing on her votaries both classes of institutions under the same temporal penalties, and as alike necessary to salvation. The authority of the Church was sufficient to turn the scale in favour of those Sabbath-days on which the anniversaries of her own appointment fell, and in process of time human holidays were practically preferred to the day which Christ had consecrated for His worship. So multitudinous had sacred days and their assigned engagements become, that not only was a large amount of productive labour lost to society, but intellectual power was uselessly expended in framing and interpreting the rules of a prodigious system of fooleries, and conscience was perplexed as well as the spirit borne down by the endless "commandments of men." "All Christianity," says the Confession of Augsburg, "was placed in the observation of certain festivals, rites, fasts, and forms of apparel." "Daily, new ceremonies, new orders, new holidays, new fasts, were appointed;

The same feelings produced anThe day of martyrdom was regarded happy life for ever," and, therefore, Such days were called Natalitia.

1" Except the first day of January, when the Gentiles had been so intent upon their own riots as to have no leisure for martyring the Christians."-Durand. Ration. Off. lib. vii. fol. 242. Durandus, alleging Eusebius as his authority, gives the number of martyrs at 5000 a day. The Editor of Cosin's Works (v. 23, notes) alleges another authority than Eusebius, and reduces the number to 500!

CONTROVERSY ABOUT HOLIDAYS.

And

and the teachers in the churches did exact these works at the
people's hands as a service necessary to deserve justification, and
they did greatly terrify their consciences if aught were omitted."
"The doctrine of the gospel," it is further observed, "is hereby
obscured, which teacheth that sins are forgiven freely by Christ---
this benefit of Christ is transferred unto the work of man."1
thus, also, was the law of morality made void as well as the law
of faith. Oppression tends to madness and anarchy; the over-
tasked will seek relief in licentious liberty; holidays were turned
into seasons for vice and riot; and, unprofitable for religious ends,
they became auxiliaries of impiety and demoralization.

The growing evil met, for many centuries, with little resistance. The later Fathers were strangely betrayed into the encouragement of the system, notwithstanding its attendant mischiefs which they observed and deplored. Not only were particular feast-days made by them the subjects of homilies and extravagant encomiums, but Basil2 and Chrysostom3 congratulated their hearers on having the martyrs as the safeguards of their country and cities against all Yet there were individuals who were not entirely carenemies. ried away by the prevailing delusion. Erius, presbyter of Sabacte in Armenia, of the fourth century, may be regarded as one of these, in so far as he contended strenuously against stated days for fasting, and the perpetuation under Christianity of Jewish feast-days. Of this individual, who also advocated the equality of bishops and presbyters, an interesting account is given by Neander.1 Augustine was engaged in seeking support for the existing holidays in the authority of the apostles and councils, and Chrysostom, in lauding the pre-eminent virtues of Easter, the historian Socrates was preparing to strike a heavy blow at their doctrine in the avowal that neither the Saviour nor the apostles enjoined by any law the observance of that leading feast, which had crept in and was kept not from canon but from custom; and in censuring those who contended for holidays as for life itself, while they regarded licentiousness as a matter of indifference, thus despising the commands of God, and making canons of their own."

1 Hall's Harmony of Confessions (1842), 391, 397.

2 Orat. on the Forty Martyrs.

4 Gen. Hist. iii. 461, 462.

While

About

3 Hom. 70, to the people of Antioch. 5 Hist. Eccl. lib. v. c. 21, 22.

the same time Vigilantius, a presbyter of Barcelona, denounced, along with other corruptions, the abuses connected with vigils and festivals. His treatise on the subject was assailed with much asperity by Jerome.1 After an interval of four centuries, Claudius, bishop of Turin (fl. 817), appears on the arena as a combatant of dominant evils. "In the abolition of all saints' days, as in other things"-opposition to the worship of images, and the veneration of relics and crosses- -"he preceded the Calvinists."2 He was followed by the Waldenses, of whom Reinerus Sacco, an apostate from themselves, and a Jacobin inquisitor, thus wrote about A.D. 1254-"They hold that all customs of the Church, except those which are to be found in the gospel, are to be contemned; for example, the feast of light, and of palms, and the feast of Pasch, of Christ, and of the saints. They work on feast-days: they disregard the fasts of the Church, dedications, and the benedictions." 3 Another writer informs us, that they rejected not only holidays in memory of saints, but all others whatsoever, as having been introduced without proper warrant, and kept no day holy except the Lord's Day. It appears that in his views on this, as on other subjects, Wycliffe anticipated the reformers, and that there were many in his time who held the same opinions. He says, that "many were inclined to be of opinion, that all saints' days ought to be abolished in order to celebrate none but the festival of Jesus Christ, because then the memory of Jesus Christ would always be recent, and the devotion of the people would not be parcelled out between Jesus Christ and his members." 5 So intolerable was the evil of multiplied holidays felt to be by thoughtful men in the following century as to produce a loud call for redress. The cardinal of Cambray brought the matter before the Council of Constance (A.D. 1414). He also pleaded for the rectification of this and of some other disorders, in his Treatise on Reformation, holding, "that excepting Sundays and the great festivals instituted by the Church, people ought to be allowed to work on holidays after Divine service, as well on account of the

1 Bruce, Annus Secularis, p. 199. Neander's Gen. Hist., iii. 456. Gretserus, in Altare Damascenum, p. 490.

4 Leger, Hist. Gén. des Eglis. Vaudois, i. 123. Heylyn's Hist. of the Sab. part 2, p. 168.

3 Blair's Hist. of the Wald. i. 408.

Bruce's AR Sec. p. 20.