History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity. A. D. 100-325

and a universal cessation of labor on Sunday until the civil government in the time of Constantine

came to the help of the church and legalized (and in part even enforced) the observance of the

Lord’s Day. This may be the reason why the religious observance of it was not expressly enjoined

by Christ and the apostles; as for similar reasons there is no prohibition of polygamy and slavery

by the letter of the New Testament, although its spirit condemns these abuses, and led to their

abolition. We may go further and say that coercive Sunday laws are against the genius and spirit

of the Christian religion which appeals to the free will of man, and uses only moral means for its

ends. A Christian government may and ought to protect the Christian Sabbath against open

desecration, but its positive observance by attending public worship, must be left to the conscientious

conviction of individuals. Religion cannot be forced by law. It looses its value when it ceases to

be voluntary.

The fathers did not regard the Christian Sunday as a continuation of, but as a substitute for,

the Jewish Sabbath, and based it not so much on the fourth commandment, and the primitive rest

of God in creation, to which the commandment expressly refers, as upon the resurrection of Christ

and the apostolic tradition. There was a disposition to disparage the Jewish law in the zeal to prove

the independent originality of Christian institutions. The same polemic interest against Judaism

ruled in the paschal controversies, and made Christian Easter a moveable feast. Nevertheless,

Sunday was always regarded in the ancient church as a divine institution, at least in the secondary

sense, as distinct from divine ordinances in the primary sense, which were directly and positively

commanded by Christ, as baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Regular public worship absolutely requires

a stated day of worship.

Ignatius was the first who contrasted Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath as something done

away with.

305

05 So did the author of the so-called Epistle of Barnabas.

306

06 Justin Martyr, in

controversy with a Jew, says that the pious before Moses pleased God without circumcision and

the Sabbath,

307

07

 and that Christianity requires not one particular Sabbath, but a perpetual

Sabbath.

308

08 He assigns as a reason for the selection of the first day for the purposes of Christian

worship, because on that day God dispelled the darkness and the chaos, and because Jesus rose

from the dead and appeared to his assembled disciples, but makes no allusion to the fourth

commandment.

309

09

 He uses the term "to sabbathize" (

           

), only of the Jews, except in the passage

just quoted, where he spiritualizes the Jewish law. Dionysius of Corinth mentions Sunday incidentally

in a letter to the church of Rome, a.d., 170: "To-day we kept the Lord’s Day holy, in which we read

your letter."

310

10

Melito of Sardis wrote a treatise on the Lord’s Day, which is lost.

311

11

Irenaeus

305

Ep. ad Magna. c. 8, 9 in the shorter Greek recension (wanting in the Syriac edition).

306

Cap. 15. This Epistle is altogether too fierce in its polemics against Judaism to be the production of the apostolic Barnabas.

307

Dial c. TryPh. M. 19, 27 (Tom. I. P. II. p. 68, 90, in the third ed. of Otto).

308

Dial. 12 (II, p. 46):

σαββατίζειν ὑμᾶς (so Otto reads, but ἡμᾶς would be better) ὁ καινὸς νόμος διὰ παντὸς (belong to

σαββατίζειν)ἐθέλει. Comp. Tertullian, Contra Jud. c. 4: "Unde nos intelligimis magis, sabbatizare nos ab omni opere servili

semper debere, et non tantum septimo quoque die, sed per omne tempus."

309

Apol. I. 67 (I. p. 161):

Τὴν δὲ τοῦ ἡλίου ἡμέραν κοινῇ πάντες τὴν συνέλευσιν ποιούμεθα, ἐπειδὴ πρώτη ἐστὶν ἡμέρα, ἐν ᾗ

ὁ θεὸς τὸ σκότος καὶ τὴν ὕλην τρέψας , κόσμον ἐποίησε, καὶ Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ ἡμέτερος σωτὴρ τῇ αυτῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκ νεκρῶν

ἀνέστη. κ.τ.λ.

310

Eusebius, H. E. IV. 23.

311

Περὶ κυριακῆς λόγος. Euseb. IV. 26.

129

Philip Schaff

History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene

Christianity. A.D. 100-325.

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of Lyons, about 170, bears testimony to the celebration of the Lord’s Day,

312

12

 but likewise regards

the Jewish Sabbath merely as a symbolical and typical ordinance, and says that "Abraham without

circumcision and without observance of Sabbaths believed in God," which proves "the symbolical

and temporary character of those ordinances, and their inability to make perfect."

313

13

Tertullian,

at the close of the second and beginning of the third century, views the Lord’s Day as figurative of

rest from sin and typical of man’s final rest, and says: "We have nothing to do with Sabbaths, new

moons or the Jewish festivals, much less with those of the heathen. We have our own solemnities,

the Lord’s Day, for instance, and Pentecost. As the heathen confine themselves to their festivals

and do not observe ours, let us confine ourselves to ours, and not meddle with those belonging to

them." He thought it wrong to fast on the Lord’s Day, or to pray kneeling during its continuance.

"Sunday we give to joy." But he also considered it Christian duty to abstain from secular care and

labor, lest we give place to the devil.

314

14

 This is the first express evidence of cessation from labor

on Sunday among Christians. The habit of standing in prayer on Sunday, which Tertullian regarded

as essential to the festive character of the day, and which was sanctioned by an ecumenical council,

was afterwards abandoned by the western church.

The Alexandrian fathers have essentially the same view, with some fancies of their own

concerning the allegorical meaning of the Jewish Sabbath.

We see then that the ante-Nicene church clearly distinguished the Christian Sunday from

the Jewish Sabbath, and put it on independent Christian ground. She did not fully appreciate the

perpetual obligation of the fourth commandment in its substance as a weekly day of rest, rooted in

the physical and moral necessities of man. This is independent of those ceremonial enactments

which were intended only for the Jews and abolished by the gospel. But, on the other hand, the

church took no secular liberties with the day. On the question of theatrical and other amusements

she was decidedly puritanic and ascetic, and denounced them as being inconsistent on any day with

the profession of a soldier of the cross. She regarded Sunday as a sacred day, as the Day of the

Lord, as the weekly commemoration of his resurrection and the pentecostal effusion of the Spirit,

and therefore as a day of holy joy and thanksgiving to be celebrated even before the rising sun by

prayer, praise, and communion with the risen Lord and Saviour.

Sunday legislation began with Constantine, and belongs to the next period.

The observance of the Sabbath among the Jewish Christians gradually ceased. Yet the

Eastern church to this day marks the seventh day of the week (excepting only the Easter Sabbath)

by omitting fasting, and by standing in prayer; while the Latin church, in direct opposition to

Judaism, made Saturday a fast day. The controversy on this point began as early as the, end of the

second century

312

In one of his fragments 

περὶ τοῦ πάσχα, and by his part in the Quartadecimanian controversy, which turned on the yearly

celebration of the Christian Passover, but implied universal agreement as to the weekly celebration of the Resurrection. Comp.

Hessey, Bampton Lectures on Sunday. London, 1860, p. 373.

313

Adv. Haer. IV. 16.

314

De Orat. c. 23: "Nos vero sicut accepimus, solo die Dominicae Resurrectionis non ab isto tantum [the bowing of the knee],

sed omni anxietatis habitu et officio cavere debemus, differentes etiam negotia, ne quem diabolo locum demus." Other passages

of Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alex., and Origen see in Hessey, l.c., pp. 375 ff.

130

Philip Schaff

History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene

Christianity. A.D. 100-325.

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