HOW AND WHEN SUNDAY APPROPRIATED THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT.
The light of the Reformation destroyed many of the best
Sunday arguments of the preceding Dark Ages—The controversy
between the Presbyterians and Episcopalians of England
brings Sunday sacredness to the test—The former discover the
means of enforcing the observance of Sunday by the fourth
commandment—How this can be done—Effects of this extraordinary
discovery—History of the Sunday festival concluded.
The light of the Reformation necessarily dissipated into thin air many
of the most substantial arguments by which the Sunday festival had
been built up during the Dark Ages. The roll that fell from Heaven—the
apparition of St. Peter—the relief of souls in purgatory, and even of the
damned in hell—and many prodigies of fearful portent—none of these, nor
all of them combined, were likely longer to sustain the sacredness of the
venerable day. True it was that when these were swept away there remained
to sustain the festival of Sunday, the canons of councils, the edicts of
kings and emperors, the decrees of the holy doctors of the church, and,
greatest of all, the imperious mandates of the Roman pontiff. Yet these
could be adduced also in behalf of the innumerable festivals ordained
by the same great apostate church. Such authority would answer for the
Episcopalian, who devoutly accepts of all these festivals, because
commanded so to do by the church; but for those who acknowledge the
Bible as the only rule of faith, the case was different. In the latter
part of the sixteenth century, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians of
England were involved in such a controversy as brought this matter to an
issue. The Episcopalians required men to observe all the festivals of the
church; the Presbyterians observed Sunday, and rejected all the rest. The
Episcopalians showed the inconsistency of this discrimination, inasmuch
as the same church authority had ordained them all. As the Presbyterians
rejected the authority of the church, they would not keep Sunday upon
that ground, especially as it would involve the observance also of all
the other festivals. They had to choose therefore between the giving up
of Sunday entirely, and the defense of its observance by the Bible. There
was indeed another and a nobler choice that they might have made, viz.,
to adopt the Sabbath of the Lord, but it was too humiliating for them
to unite with those who retained that ancient and sacred institution.
The issue of this struggle is thus related by a distinguished German
theologian, Hengstenberg:—
“The opinion that the Sabbath was transferred to the Sunday
was first broached in its perfect form, and with all its
consequences, in the controversy which was carried on in
England between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. The
Presbyterians, who carried to extremes the principle, that
every institution of the church must have its foundation in the
Scriptures, and would not allow that God had given, in this
respect, greater liberty to the church of the New Testament,
which his Spirit had brought to maturity, than to that of
the Old, charged the Episcopalians with popish leaven, and
superstition, and subjection to the ordinances of men, because
they retained the Christian feasts. The Episcopalians, on the
other hand, as a proof that greater liberty was granted to
the New-Testament church in such matters as these, appealed
to the fact that even the observance of the Sunday was only
an arrangement of the church. The Presbyterians were now in a
position which compelled them either to give up the observance
of the Sunday, or to maintain that a divine appointment from
God separated it from the other festivals. The first they could
not do, for their Christian experience was too deep for them
not to know how greatly the weakness of human nature stands in
need of regularly returning periods, devoted to the service of
God. They therefore decided upon the latter.”[1042]
Thus much for the occasion of that wonderful discovery by which the
Scriptures are made to sustain the divine appointment of Sunday as the
Christian Sabbath. The date of the discovery, the name of the discoverer,
and the manner in which he contrived to enforce the first day of the
week by the authority of the fourth commandment, are thus set forth by a
candid first-day historian, Lyman Coleman:—
“The true doctrine of the Christian Sabbath was first
promulgated by an English dissenter, the Rev. Nicholas Bound,
D. D., of Norton, in the county of Suffolk. About the year
1595, he published a famous book, entitled, ‘Sabbathum Veteris
et Novi Testamenti,’ or the True Doctrine of the Sabbath. In
this book he maintained ‘that the seventh part of our time
ought to be devoted to God—that Christians are bound to rest on
the Lord’s day as much as the Jews were on the Mosaic Sabbath,
the commandment about rest being moral and perpetual; and that
it was not lawful for persons to follow their studies or
worldly business on that day, nor to use such pleasures and
recreations as are permitted on other days.’ This book spread
with wonderful rapidity. The doctrine which it propounded
called forth from many hearts a ready response, and the result
was a most pleasing reformation in many parts of the kingdom.
‘It is almost incredible,’ says Fuller, ‘how taking this
doctrine was, partly because of its own purity, and partly for
the eminent piety of such persons as maintained it; so that the
Lord’s day, especially in corporations, began to be precisely
kept; people becoming a law unto themselves, forbearing such
sports as yet by statute permitted; yea, many rejoicing at
their own restraint herein.’ The law of the Sabbath was indeed
a religious principle, after which the Christian church had,
for centuries, been darkly groping. Pious men of every age had
felt the necessity of divine authority for sanctifying the
day. Their conscience had been in advance of their reason.
Practically they had kept the Sabbath better than their
principles required.
“Public sentiment, however, was still unsettled in regard to
this new doctrine respecting the Sabbath, though a few at first
violently opposed it. ‘Learned men were much divided in their
judgments about these Sabbatarian doctrines; some embraced them
as ancient truths consonant to Scripture, long disused and
neglected, now seasonably revived for the increase of piety.
Others conceived them grounded on a wrong bottom; but because
they tended to the manifest advance of religion, it was a pity
to oppose them; seeing none have just reason to complain, being
deceived unto their own good. But a third sort flatly fell out
with these propositions, as galling men’s necks with a _Jewish
yoke_ against the liberty of Christians; that Christ, as Lord
of the Sabbath, had removed the rigor thereof, and allowed men
lawful recreations; _that this doctrine put an unequal lustre
on the Sunday_, on set purpose to eclipse all other holy days,
to the derogation of the authority of the church; that this
strict observance was set up out of faction, to be a character
of difference to brand all for libertines who did not entertain
it.’ No open opposition, however, was at first manifested
against the sentiments of Dr. Bound. No reply was attempted
for several years, and ‘not so much as a feather of a quill in
print did wag against him.’
“His work was soon followed by several other treatises in
defense of the same sentiments. ‘All the Puritans fell in with
this doctrine, and distinguished themselves by spending that
part of sacred time in public, family, and private devotion.’
Even Dr. Heylyn certified the triumphant spread of those
puritanical sentiments respecting the Sabbath....
“‘This doctrine,’ he says, ‘carrying such a fair show of piety,
at least in the opinion of the common people, and such as did
not examine the true grounds of it, induced many to embrace
and defend it; and in a very little time it became the most
bewitching error and the most popular infatuation that ever was
embraced by the people of England.’”[1043]
Dr. Bound was not absolutely the inventor of the seventh-part-of-time
theory; but he may be said rather to have gathered up and combined the
scattered hints of his predecessors, and to have added to these something
of his own production. His grounds for asserting Sunday to be the Sabbath
of the fourth commandment are these:—
“That which is natural, namely, that every seventh day should
be kept holy unto the Lord, that still remaineth: that which is
positive, namely, that day which was the seventh day from the
creation, should be the Sabbath, or day of rest, that is now
changed in the church of God.”[1044]
He says that the meaning of the declaration, “The seventh day is the
Sabbath of the Lord thy God,” is this:—
“There must be one [day] of seven and not [one] of eight.”[1045]
But the special key to the whole theory is in the statement that the
seventh day in the commandment was “_genus_,” that is to say, it was a
kind of seventh day which comprehended several species of seventh days,
at least two. Thus he says:—
“So he maketh the seventh day to be _genus_ in this
commandment, and to be perpetual: and in it by virtue of
the commandment to comprehend these two species or kinds:
the Sabbath of the Jews and of the Gentiles, of the law
and of the gospel: so that both of them were comprehended
in the commandment, even as _genus_ comprehendeth both his
species.”[1046]
He enforces the first day by the fourth commandment, as follows:—
“So that we have not in the gospel a new commandment for the
Sabbath, diverse from that that was in the law; but there is a
diverse time appointed; namely, not the seventh day from the
creation, but the day of Christ’s resurrection, and the seventh
from that: both of them at several times being comprehended in
the fourth commandment.”[1047]
He means to say that the fourth commandment enforces the seventh day from
the creation to the resurrection of Christ, and since that enforces a
different seventh day, namely, the seventh from Christ’s resurrection.
Such is the perverse ingenuity by which men can evade the law of God and
yet make it appear that they are faithfully observing it.
Such was the origin of the seventh-part-of-time theory, by which the
seventh day is dropped out of the fourth commandment, and one day in
seven slipped into its place; a doctrine most opportunely framed at
the very period when nothing else could save the venerable day of the
sun. With the aid of this theory, the Sunday of “Pope and Pagan” was
able coolly to wrap itself in the fourth commandment, and then in the
character of a divine institution, to challenge obedience from all Bible
Christians. It could now cast away the other frauds on which its very
existence had depended, and support its authority by this one alone. In
the time of Constantine it ascended the throne of the Roman Empire, and
during the whole period of the Dark Ages it maintained its supremacy from
the chair of St. Peter; but now it had ascended the throne of the Most
High. And thus a day which God “commanded not nor spake it, neither came
it into” his “mind,” was enjoined upon mankind with all the authority of
his holy law. The immediate effect of Dr. Bound’s work upon the existing
controversy is thus described by an Episcopalian eye-witness, Dr. Heylyn:—
“For by inculcating to the people these new Sabbath
speculations [concerning Sunday], teaching that that day only
‘was of God’s appointment, and all the rest observed in the
church of England, a remnant of the will-worship in the church
of Rome;’ the other holy days in this church established,
were so shrewdly shaken that till this day they are not well
recovered of the blow then given. Nor came this on the by
or besides their purpose, but as a thing that specially was
intended from the first beginning.”[1048]
In a former chapter, we called attention to the fact that Sunday can
be maintained as a divine institution only by adopting the rule of
faith acknowledged in the church of Rome, which is, the Bible with
the traditions of the church added thereto. We have seen that in the
sixteenth century the Presbyterians of England were brought to decide
between giving up Sunday as a church festival and maintaining it as
a divine institution by the Bible. They chose the latter course. Yet
while apparently avoiding the charge of observing a Catholic festival,
by claiming to prove the Sunday institution out of the Bible, the
utterly unsatisfactory nature of the several inferences adduced from
the Scriptures in support of that day, compelled them to resort to the
traditions of the church, and to add these to their so-called biblical
evidences in its behalf. It would be no worse to keep Sunday while
frankly acknowledging it to be a festival of the Catholic church, not
commanded in the Bible, than it is to profess that you observe it as a
biblical institution, and then prove it to be such by adopting the rule
of faith of the Romanists. Joaunes Perrone, an eminent Italian Catholic
theologian, in an important doctrinal work, entitled, “Theological
Lessons,” makes a very impressive statement respecting the acknowledgment
of tradition by Protestant Sunday-keepers. In his chapter “Concerning
the Necessity and Existence of Tradition,” he lays down the proposition
that it is necessary to admit doctrines which we can prove only from
tradition, and cannot sustain from the Holy Scriptures. Then he says:—
“It is not possible, indeed, if traditions of such character
are rejected, that several doctrines, which the Protestants
held with us since they withdrew from the Catholic church,
could, in any possible manner, be established. The fact is
placed beyond a venture of a doubt, for they themselves hold
with us the validity of baptism administered by heretics or
infidels, the validity also of infant baptism, the true form
of baptism [sprinkling]; they held, too, that the law of
abstaining from blood and anything strangled is not in force;
also concerning the substitution of the Lord’s day for the
Sabbath; besides those things which I have mentioned before,
and not a few others.”[1049]
Dr. Bound’s theory of the seventh part of time has found general
acceptance in all those churches which sprung from the church of Rome.
Most forcibly did old Cotton Mather observe:—
“The reforming churches, flying from Rome, carried, some of
them more, some of them less, all of them something, of Rome
with them.”[1050]
One sacred treasure which they all drew from the venerable mother of
harlots is the ancient festival of the sun. She had crushed out of her
communion the Sabbath of the Lord, and having adopted the venerable day
of the sun, had transformed it into the Lord’s day of the Christian
church. The reformed, flying from her communion, and carrying with
them this ancient festival, now found themselves able to justify its
observance as being indeed the veritable Sabbath of the Lord! As the
seamless coat of Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, was torn from him before
he was nailed to the cross, so has the fourth commandment been torn
from the rest-day of the Lord, around which it was placed by the great
Law-giver, and given to this papal Lord’s day; and this Barabbas the
robber, thus arrayed in the stolen fourth commandment, has from that
time to the present day, and with astonishing success, challenged the
obedience of the world as the divinely appointed Sabbath of the most
high God. Here we close the history of the Sunday festival, now fully
transformed into the _Christian Sabbath_. A rapid survey of the history
of English and American Sabbath-keepers will conclude this work.