SABBATH” AND “SUNDAY

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 14, 1856

“SABBATH” AND “SUNDAY.”

A correspondent of the London Notes and Queries says, the only words used in English for the first day of the week, before the existence of Puritanism, were Sunday and Lord’s day. The former of these expressions was used by our Saxon ancestors, with all other Teutonic nations. The latter was adopted from the Christian form of Southern Europe. Sunday in Italian still retains the Hebrew name of Sabbato. The word for Sunday, in Russian, means resurrection; “identifying the day, as the Southern nations do, though more significantly, with the great triumph of the Christian faith.” D’Israeli, in his Commentary on the Life of Charles I, fixes the reign of Elizabeth, and the year 1554, as the period when Sunday was first called Sabbath-day, (dies Sabbati.) He says: “It was in the reign of Elizabeth, during the unsettled state of the national religion, that a sect arose among these reformers of the reformed, who were known by the name of Sabbatarians.” Also that “John Knox, the great reformer of Scotland, was the true father of this new doctrine in England, although Knox was the bosom friend of Calvin.” (Vol. ii, c. 16, p. 353.) Calvin was opposed, as were indeed Luther and other great reformers of that day, to Knox’s views of Sunday; Calvin himself was behind some of the present day professors, if a tradition at Geneva is true, “That when John Knox visited Calvin on a Sunday, he found his austere coadjutor bowling on a green. At this day, and in that place, [continues D’Israeli,] a Calvinist preacher after his sermon will take his seat at the card table.” This question is so much involved with the death of Charles I, and the rise of the Commonwealth, that D’Israeli has treated of it very largely in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his second volume, and with great erudition, judgment, and taste.—Spir. Tel.