branch of the moral law, an effect of that most general commandment, "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart"—and an injunction expressly given in the fourth commandment. The Jewish converts still observed their own Sabbath; but then they yielded without objection to the apostolic example and authority, in joining the Gentile converts in celebrating the day of their Lord's resurrection.

They were circumcised; but they were also willingly baptized. They celebrated the passover; but they willingly added the Lord's Supper. They worshipped in the temples and the synagogues; but they assembled also in the Christian churches. So long as the Jewish services were neither attacked nor neglected, they made no objection to that of the Christian church. Thus the new ordinances grew into use, veneration, habit. When the apostles declared in the Epistles to the Galatians and Hebrews, that the Jewish covenant was ready to vanish away, and that no reliance whatever upon its ceremonies was to interfere with a simple faith in Christ for justification, the minds of the Jewish believers were prepared to submit.. Thus things continued for nearly forty years after the resurrection.

The destruction of Jerusalem takes place. The Jewish polity is dissolved. The temple is left without one stone upon another. The Jewish priesthood, altars, sacrifices, covenant, Sabbath, all disappear. The Lord's day becomes the day of religious rest. No controversy arises. The seventh-day Sabbath dies without a struggle, by the force of circumstances directed by an unfailing providence. What wisdom and consideration, then, appears in the conduct of the apostles! As the whole church of Jewish and Christian converts agreed in one grand moral duty, the consecration of a day of rest to God, and as the stream of events was about to carry away the whole Jewish economy, the apostles left matters to work. They laid down the general truth of the non-obligation of the Mosaical law-they consecrated by their example, the change of the day of the Sabbath; but they awakened no unnecessary prejudices. They cheerfully met the Jewish assemblies on the seventh day, for the purpose of preaching the gospel to them. They issued no public decree. A non-essential matter, they were assured, would find its level. How great would have been the consternation of the Jewish be

lievers, if their Sabbath, their golden day, the first of their commandments, the badge of their nation, the glory of their state as a church, had been openly impugned! Nor could the apostles have abolished it, so far as it was a political ordinance, and interwoven with the civil policy of the Jewish people. They waited therefore. They left the Jewish Sabbath gradually to expire, and the Christian to succeed, without any express command, or any attempt at a violent and sudden transfer.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, the case became different. The time of concession was over. Moses had vanished away. The Jewish church was no longer the church of God. The dispersed Jews were under the judicial blindness which the rejection of their Messiah had brought upon them. Their hatred of Christianity was infuriate. Christians then must now openly separate from the communion of a repudiated church. The Jewish Sabbath, the most visible character of their worship, must now openly give place to the Lord's day. The consecration of that day is now a necessary protest against Judaism, even as the Jewish Sabbath had been against idolatry. Christians unite the two. Their Lord's day is an open protest against atheism and idolatry on the one hand, and Judaism and superstition on the other. By it they publicly profess their belief in the three grand articles of the creed-"In God the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth,' who first instituted at the creation a weekly rest after six days' labor-"And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord," who rose on this day, and drew to it the season of sacred joy-and in "the Holy Ghost," who descended on the same day to found the church and to qualify the apostles, and who is its abiding comforter and guide.

And thus the Lord's day is gradually but firmly and completely established, by exactly that kind of evidence which the nature of the case demanded, and the wisdom of God saw to be best. Its authority is divine, because the example of the Lord of the Sabbath, and of his apostles, inspired to found his church, is a divine authority for any change; especially for one immaterial in itself, and entirely consistent with the fundamental law of the institution.

5. But it may naturally be asked, what say ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORIANS-what the apostolic Fathers?-Do

they bear witness to the observation of the first day of the week? Do they ascribe to the command of Christ and the inspired founders of their churches, the transfer of the day of rest from the last to the first of the week? To this we reply, that there is no one fact upon which all testimony more completely agrees than this. "I should hold it too long," says Bishop Andrews, to "cite them in particular; I avow it on my credit, that there is not an ecclesiastical writer in whom it is not to be found."*

Ignatius, a companion of the apostle, says, "Let us no more sabbatize, but let us keep the Lord's day, on which our life arose."

Justin Martyr, at the close of the first, and the beginning of the second century tells us, "On the day called Sunday is an assembly of all who live in the city or country, and the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read." And he adds, that "it was the day on which the creation of the world began, and on which Christ arose from the dead."

Irenæus, a disciple of Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John himself, says, "On the Lord's day every one of us Christians keeps the Sabbath, meditating on the law, and rejoicing in the works of God."

Tertullian, at the close of the second century, asserts it to be "the holy day of the Christian church assemblies, and holy worship"-that "every eighth day is the Christian's festival""kept as a day of rejoicing."

Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, in the time of Irenæus, says, in his second letter to the church of Rome, "To-day we celebrate the Lord's day, when we read your epistle to us."

St. Ambrose observes, "the Lord's day was sacred or consecrated by the resurrection of Christ."

The council of Laodicea, about the year 363, forbad Christians to rest from labor on the seventh day, "for Christians ought not to rest on the Sabbath, that is, the seventh day, but preferring the Lord's day to rest as Christians, if indeed it is in their power."

St. Augustine tells us, that "the Lord's day was by the resurrection of Christ declared to Christians, and from that

*Bishop Andrews on the ten commandments--a work of incomparable value-from which, and Baxter and Dwight, I collect my testimonies.

very time it began to be celebrated as the Christian's festival."

Epiphanius, in his sermon upon the day of Christ's resurrection, has this expression, "This is the day which God blessed and sanctified, because in it he ceased from all his labors which he had perfectly accomplished, the salvation both of those on earth and those under the earth."

Athanasius says, "The Lord transferred the Sabbath to the Lord's day." The Emperor Constantine, as soon as he embraced the Christian faith, made a law to exempt the Lord's day from being Juridical.

And finally, Leo, (A. D. 469) thus expresses the sentiments of the whole Christian church: We ordain according to the true meaning of the Holy Ghost, and of the apostles thereby directed, that on the sacred day wherein our own integrity was restored, all do rest and cease from labor; that neither husbandmen nor other on that day, put their hand to forbidden work. For if the Jews did so much reverence their Sabbaths, which were but a shadow of ours, are not we which inhabit the light and truth of grace, bound to honor that day which the Lord himself hath honored, and hath therein delivered us from dishonor and from death? Are we not bound to keep it singular and inviolable, well contenting ourselves with so liberal a grant of the rest, and not encroaching upon that one day which God hath chosen to his own honor? Were it not reckless neglect of religion to make that very day common, and to think we may do with it as with the rest?*

Thus decisive is the testimony to the fact, that the Lord's day was considered by the primitive church to be appointed by the divine authority of the apostles, the especial delegates and ambassadors of Christ, armed with his commission, and inspired with his spirit.

It deserves remark, that the brief description which Pliny, in his celebrated letter to Trajan, gives of the Christian worship, entirely accords with our general testimony: "They are accustomed to meet on a stated day before light, and to sing amongst themselves hymns to Christ, as to a God." Indeed, the celebration of the Lord's day was so notorious even to the Heathens themselves, that it was ever a question of theirs to the martyrs, "Dominicum ser

* Hooker.

vasti?" "Do you keep Sunday?" And their answer was equally well known; they all aver it: "I am a Christian; I cannot omit it."

6. And why should I detain you longer? Why should I do more than notice THAT PERPETUAL BLESSING WHICH HAS ATTENDED THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH, and which attends it now? Why should I call to your memory all the conversions which have crowned the Lord's day during eighteen centuries, in every part of the world? The whole church has been built up upon this divinely transferred season-the whole church has been enlarged, comforted, sanctified on it. If the primitive Christians were mistaken in supposing the change from the seventh to the first day of the week to have been of apostolic authority, then God has permitted this mistake to be confirmed, and to take root, by his especial blessing, and the continued operations of his grace, during the whole period of the Christian church. But the idea is too absurd. For when we consider the comparative non-importance in itself, of the particular day in the week on which we keep the Sabbath, supposing the portion of time which the eternal rule of the fourth commandment requires, is preserved; and when we reflect on all the preparatory circumstances which laid a probable ground for the change; and when to these we add the gradual but decisive manner in which that change was introduced, sustained by the events of God's awful providence in the destruction of the Jewish polity and Sabbath, and testified by the united voice of all ecclesiastical antiquity; we have a mass of evidence to the divine authority of our Christian Sabbath, sufficient to satisfy every candid mind. The blessing of God, therefore, which has actually attended, and is actually attending, in such large and perpetual operations of grace, the Lord's day, is in full accordance with every other species of proof, and crowns the whole argument.

The change, indeed, after all, amounts only to this. Under the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations, the Sabbath was considered as following the other days. Under the Christian it precedes. Under the former economies, creation and the redemption from Egypt were the greatest benefits conferred upon man. Under the Christian, the spiritual redemption--the resurrection of Christ--the new