apostolic church followed in general the Jewish usage, but purged it from superstition and filled it
with the spirit of faith and freedom.- Accordingly, the Jewish Hours of daily prayer, particularly in the morning and evening,
were observed as a matter of habit, besides the strictly private devotions which are bound to no
time. - The Lord’s Day took the place of the Jewish Sabbath as the weekly day of public worship.
The substance remained, the form was changed. The institution of a periodical weekly day of rest
for the body and the soul is rooted in our physical and moral nature, and is as old as man, dating,
like marriage, from paradise.^688 This is implied in the profound saying of our Lord: "The Sabbath
is made for man."
It is incorporated in the Decalogue, the moral law, which Christ did not come to destroy,
but to fulfil, and which cannot be robbed of one commandment without injury to all the rest.
At the same time the Jewish Sabbath was hedged around by many national and ceremonial
restrictions, which were not intended to be permanent, but were gradually made so prominent as
to overshadow its great moral aim, and to make man subservient to the sabbath instead of the
sabbath to man. After the exile and in the hands of the Pharisees it became a legal bondage rather
than a privilege and benediction. Christ as the Lord of the Sabbath opposed this mechanical
ceremonialism and restored the true spirit and benevolent aim of the institution.^689 When the slavish,
superstitious, and self-righteous sabbatarianism of the Pharisees crept into the Galatian churches
and was made a condition of justification, Paul rebuked it as a relapse into Judaism.^690
The day was transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week, not on the ground of
a particular command, but by the free spirit of the gospel and by the power of certain great facts
which he at the foundation of the Christian church. It was on that day that Christ rose from the
dead; that he appeared to Mary, the disciples of Emmaus, and the assembled apostles; that he poured
out his Spirit and founded the church;^691 and that he revealed to his beloved disciple the mysteries
(^688) Gen. 2:3. This passage is sometimes explained in a proleptic sense; but religious rest-days, dies feriati, are found among
most ancient nations, and recent Assyrian and Babylonian discoveries confirm the pre-Mosaic origin of the weekly Sabbath.
See Sayce’s revision of George Smith’s Chaldean Account of Genesis, Lond. and N. York, 1881, p. 89: "If references to the Fall
are few and obscure, there can be no doubt that the Sabbath was an Accadian [primitive Chaldaean] institution, intimately
connected with the worship of the seven planets. The astronomical tablets have shown that the seven-day week was of Accadian
origin, each day of it being dedicated to the sun, moon, and five planets, and the word Sabbath itself, under the form of Sabattu,
was known to the Assyrians, and explained by them as ’a day of rest for the heart.’A calendar of Saints’ days for the month of
the intercalary Elul makes the 7th, 14th, 19th, 2lst, and 28th days of the lunar months, Sabbaths on which no work was allowed
to be done. The Accadian words by which the idea of Sabbath is denoted, literally mean: ’a day on which work is unlawful,’and
are interpreted in the bilingual tablets as signifying ’a day of peace or completion of labors.’" Smith then gives the rigid injunctions
which the calendar lays down to the king for each of these sabbaths. Comp. also Transactions of Soc. for Bibl. Archaeol., vol.
V., 427.
(^689) Matt. 12:1 sqq., 10 sqq., and the parallel passages in Mark and Luke; also John 5:8 sqq.; 6:23; 9:14, 16.
(^690) Gal. 4:10; Comp. Rom. 14:5; Col. 2:16. The spirit of the pharisaical sabbatarianism with which Christ and St, Paul had to
deal may be inferred from the fact that even Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, and one of the wisest and most liberal Rabbis, let his ass
die on the Sabbath because he thought it a sin to unload him; and this was praised as an act of piety. Other Rabbis prohibited
the saving of an ass from a ditch on the Sabbath, but allowed a plank to be laid so as to give the beast a chance to save himself.
One great controversy between the schools of Shammai and Hillel turned around the mighty question whether it was lawful to
eat an egg which was laid on the Sabbath day, and the wise Hillel denied it! Then it would be still more sinful to eat a chicken
that had the misfortune to be born, or to be killed, on a Sabbath.
(^691) The day of Pentecost (whether Saturday or Sunday) is disputed, but the church always celebrated it on a Sunday. See § 24,
p. 241.
A.D. 1-100.