The Sabbath and the Sunday

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A CRITICAL HISTORY

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OF

THE SABBATH AND THE SUNDAY

IN THE

CHRISTIAN CHURCH

(SECOND EDITION, REVISED)

BY A. H. LEWIS D. D., LL.D.,

Author of "Biblical Teachings concerning the Sabbath and the Sunday," "History of Sunday Legislation", "Paganism Surviving In Christianity," etc., etc.

THE AMERICAN SABBATH TRACT SOCIETY,

PLAINFLIELD, N. J., 1903.

PREFACE.

REFORMS, like apples, have their time to ripen. When they are ripe, the harvest must be gathered. Wishing cannot hasten that time, nor fear delay it. The Sabbath question is ripe for re-examination and restatement. It is at the front. It has come to stay. We must grapple with it. The first key to its solution is the authority of God's Word. The facts of history are the second key. Eternity is an attribute of God, and time is one measured part of eternity. Results in history are the decisions of God. In testing theories and practices, the historic argument is ultimate. It is the embodiment of Christ's words: "By their fruits ye shall know them." Theorizing can never go back of this test, nor set aside its decisions.

No department of church history has been less thoroughly worked than the history of the Sabbath and the Sunday. They both antedate Christianity and Judaism. As the question is presented to us now, the chief interest centers in the New Testament and in the Patristic period. The former is usually treated polemically, while the latter is almost an unknown region to the average Christian. It is also true that few people have more than a confused knowledge of the Sabbath question since the Puritan movement of three hundred years ago. That movement was forced to seek some support for itself in early church history. In seeking this, many quotations have been claimed from the Fathers which subsequent investigations have shown to be notoriously incorrect. These have been passed from hand to hand, apparently without examination or question. Forged writings have been treated as genuine. Unknown dates have been assumed to be definite. Important expressions, such as "Christian Sabbath" and "Dominicum servasti," have been manufactured and interpolated. In this way history has been perverted and good men have been misled. Few American writers have attempted any careful survey of this field, and the early English works on the Sabbath question and its history are out of print. Most of the books in defense of Sunday, within the last fifty years, have been hastily written to. meet the demands of some convention, or some emergency, created by the decline of the Puritan theory, and the secularization of Sunday. This has forbidden patient and efficient original research. Still stronger reasons have sat at the elbow of every writer in defense of the Puritan, or the American Sunday. The facts of the first four centuries destroy the foundation on which Puritanism rested its "Sunday Sabbath."

Because these things are so, this book has been written. It is written in the interest of the church universal, and of the preservation of the Sabbath, without which Christianity is shorn of one of its chief elements of power, and humanity is robbed of one of its chief blessings. We have given our authorities, with copious references, that who will may follow and test our work. These pages are not the product of yesterday, nor are they written for to morrow alone. We know that they must meet the prejudice of creed and the power of popular custom They must take their way between the upper an nether millstones of eternal verities. Nothing less than sifted facts can abide as the foundation for hope, or faith, or practice. Men build pleasant theories and indulge in glowing fancies concerning what they think ought to be, but the relentless hand of history gathers all that is not in accord wit eternal verity for the dust heaps of the past.

Conscious that every page must die which is no born of verity, and equally conscious that every page thus born will live in spite of creed or custom, this book goes forth, willing to await the broader knowledge, the calm judgment, and the verdicts of history in coming years.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

HISTORY is an organic development. The phenomena which appear on the surface are the result of underlying principles, true or false. Nothing in history comes by chance. If human choices did not lead men to disobedience of God's laws, and to disregard for truth, there would be no discord, but rather a continuous, straight forward advancement. What men call the power of truth, the logic of events and the guiding hand of Providence, is but another way of saying that truth - God's eternal ideas concerning right and wrong is stronger than all human choices, and will ultimately prevail. It is the unfolding of God's ideas in history that gives it organic power and irresistible force. Human disobedience may check or deflect the progress of truth temporarily. Disobedience is the conflict of the lesser with the greater. It may go so far as to destroy the less, but it can never attain a permanent triumph in God's moral government. It is the dam of rushes across the swollen stream; the barricade of straw. Evil and error have limited lease of life. Truth is mighty and will prevail, is an adage which voices the deeper philosophy of history. Every page of the past confirms this truth. The invisible hand of Jehovah touches the current of evil, and it flows backward like the parting waters of the Red Sea. As the granite sea-wall says to the waves, Thus far and no farther, so, in the fullness of God's time, right and righteousness prevail. The times when God thus vindicates himself and his cause we call great epochs in history. But the greatest epoch is only the result of silent forces which are constantly at work. The currents of good often run deep, are sometimes wholly out of sight for a long time. The thoughtless and faint-hearted say, They are gone forever. Those who listen more carefully are always assured that Truth still lives.

In view of these facts, the history of a great question, like that of which the following pages treat, is of vital importance. We can never judge correctly concerning the present except in the light of the past. To-day is the product of one or all of the yesterdays. Things are neither right nor wrong because they exist. Human majorities, as such, are not right. They are likely to be thoughtless and self-reliant and wrong.

The Sabbath question has had a prominent place in the religious history of our race. The week, measured by the Sabbath as its closing day, is the oldest division of time. It is found wherever history reaches. The Sabbath question comes close to human life. Social life, business life, religious worship and culture are all blended with it and are dependent on it. It is a question that has never been kept in abeyance for any great length of time, however much it may have been ignored. It was prominent in the Jewish church. It claimed early attention in the history of Christianity. It came to the front in the Reformation. It was prominent in the earlier years of our national life. It is to-day, though much ignored by some, and treated vigorously with narcotics by others, one of the questions which still demands recognition and solution. The actual history of the Sabbath is not well understood. The earlier centuries have not been carefully explored even by religious teachers. Much has been taken for granted, where the facts are unknown. We ask a full and careful re-examination of the whole question. Final results may be ignored for a time, but they will compel recognition.

CHAPTER II.

SCRIPTURE TESTIMONY.

IT does not seem needful that the passages in the Bible which refer to the Sabbath and the Sunday should be reproduced here. Every reader has the Bible at band. and all it says concerning these days can be studied from that original source. It is said sometimes that "The Sabbath finds no place in the New Testament. The other commands of the Decalogue are recognized, but the fourth is not." Over against these and similar incorrect statements we offer the following facts:

The Sabbath is mentioned in the New Testament fifty-eight times, and always in its specific character as a sacred day for rest, worship and deeds of mercy. These references are all in the historical portions of the New Testament, the Gospels and the Acts. They are distributed as follows: Matt. 10, Mark 11, Luke 18, John 10, Acts 9.

All these references are to the Sabbath as a definite and distinct day, the last day of the week, now called with great impropriety "Saturday." Forty-eight of these references are in the Gospels. These show how Christ, the Creator and Lord of the Sabbath, observed it, and what he taught concerning it. New Testament history centers around Christ. His life and teachings created that book. Those who honor Christ more than. they do their own choices, or the theories and practices which men have invented, will settle the Sabbath question by his teachings and example. Less than this is disloyalty to him. Theories, speculations, customs, church authority and civil law, if at variance with Christ and his example, should be set aside. The honest man who is not blinded by false conceptions of what it is to obey Christ will not hesitate to make him and his practice the standard in the matter of Sabbath-keeping.

When Christ's public ministry began, the Sabbath was burdened by numberless unnatural requirements which neither the letter nor the spirit of the fourth command demanded. As a consequence it became a prominent point of attack and defense between Christ and the Pharisees. He openly ignored these abnormal growths, and discarded many things which tradition had fixed upon Sabbath-observance; hence they charged him with "Sabbath-breaking." What he did was to restore the Sabbath to its true place, and thus fit it for service and acceptance in his kingdom. When his work is understood, every point which has been or can be claimed for a "Christian Sabbath" is fully met in the Sabbath thus freed from the unjust restraints which the Judaism of that time had imposed. This work of pruning was so necessary that in it we find the reason for so many references to the Sabbath in the Gospels. As compared with the references made to other laws of the Decalogue, the references to the Sabbath, and Christ's example concerning it, are more than all the others put together. Remembering then that Christ's aim was not the destruction nor removal of the Sabbath, but rather to set it free from Judaistic misconceptions, we shall be able to comprehend the real nature of the incidents which form its history in the Gospels.

If the reader will take the New Testament and, beginning with Matt. 12:1-13, will follow through what is said regarding the Sabbath and the position which Christ and his apostles took concerning it, he cannot fail to learn that the church of the New Testament period was a Sabbath-keeping church, according to the example and teachings of a Sabbath-keeping Christ. The "Lord of the Sabbath" taught its true place and character in his kingdom.

SUNDAY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.

The first day of the week is mentioned in the New Testament but eight times. Six of these references are found in the Gospels, and the same day is referred to in each case. There is but one reference to Sunday in the Book of Acts, and one in the Epistles. For a full discussion of these passages, historically and theologically, see my "Biblical Teachings Concerning the Sabbath and the Sunday," published by the American Sabbath Tract Society, pp. 50-89.

CHAPTER III.

THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS.

MATERIAL for the history of Christianity during the century immediately succeeding the apostolic period is meager and imperfect. The earlier post-apostolic writings are fragmentary. In many instances neither the date of the treatise nor the name of the author are known. Forgeries abound. Apocryphal Gospels and Epistles meet the investigator at every step, leading the unwary and over-credulous astray. The stream of written Christian history which runs through the Gospels and the Book of Acts drops out of sight like a "lost river" for a time, and when it reappears is not a little polluted by what has been gathered in its underground wanderings. The best products of the sub-apostolic age are known as the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. A comparison of these with the New Testament shows that they fall infinitely below the apostolic standard. There is a great gulf between them. Since Sunday has no history in the New Testament, its advocates in modern times have labored strenuously to find some support for it in the earlier post-apostolic productions. We will examine these in their order, and at length, in order to correct the wrong conclusions and the perversion of facts which come from such loose writing.

THE FIRST EPISTLE OF CLEMENT OF ROME, TO THE CORINTHIANS.

This was probably written about the year 97 A.D. A few defenders of Sunday have referred to or quoted from this Epistle, seeking inferential argument in favor of their theories. The passages are as follows:

"These things therefore being manifest to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behooves us to do all things in [their proper] order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. He has enjoined offerings [to be presented] and service to be performed [to Him], and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly but at the appointed times and hours. Where and by whom He desires these things to be done, He Himself has fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him. Those, therefore, who present their offerings at the appointed times, are accepted and blessed; for inasmuch as they follow the laws of the Lord, they sin not. For His own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the priests, and their own special ministrations devolve on the Levites. The layman is bound by the laws that pertain to laymen.