Some Opposers of the Sabbath in Early Centuries
By W. A. S.
Some Opposers of the Sabbath in Early Centuries
From Genesis to Revelation, the Scriptures know but one day of rest, the seventh day, the Sabbath of the Lord our God. The last glimpse we get of the New Testament church shows it keeping the Sabbath, just as Christ had set the example for all time and all people, in his own life; so that Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, could say truthfully to the Jews at Rome, near the close of his life:— “I have committed nothing against the people, or customs of our fathers.” Acts 28:17. Had he been keeping the first day instead of the seventh, or teaching others to do so, he could not have said this. But as soon as we pass on in secular history to the times of apostasy, we find the forces of error attacking the Sabbath and those who observed it. As Schaff says:— The councils, while they turned the Lord’s day itself [meaning Sunday] into a legal ordinance handed down from the apostles, pronounced with all decision against the Jewish Sabbathism.—“History of Christian Church,” Vol. III, page 382. It was not Sabbath-keeping by Jews that troubled the councils. It was the observance of the divine day of rest by Christians that stirred the enmity of the apostasy. The Sabbath is the mark of loyalty to the true God and to his law, and all through the centuries the keeping of it has aroused the spirit of the dragon. In the year 364, the council of Laodicea recommended a sort of Sunday observance, but vigorously denounced Sabbath-keeping Christians:— Canon 29.—Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday [“Sabbath” is the word in the text], but shall work on that day; but the Lord’s day they shall especially honor, and, as being Christians, shall, if possible, do no work on that day. If, however, they are found Judaizing, they shall be shut out from Christ. Two hundred fifty years later, in Rome itself, Sabbath-keepers were troubling Gregory the Great (pope, 590-604). In a letter “to the citizens of Rome,” dated in the year 602, he said:— Gregory, servant of the servants of God, to his most beloved sons the Roman citizens. It has come to my ears that certain men of perverse spirit have sown among you some things that are wrong and opposed to the holy faith, so as to forbid any work being done on the Sabbath day. What else can I call these but preachers of Antichrist, who, when he comes, will cause the Sabbath day as well as the Lord’s day to be kept free from all work. For, because he pretends to die and rise again, he wishes the Lord’s day to be had in reverence; and, because he compels the people to Judaize that he may bring back the outward rite of the law, and subject the perfidy of the Jews to himself, he wishes the Sabbath to be observed. For this which is said by the prophet, “Ye shall bring in no burden through your gates on the Sabbath day” (Jer. 17:24), could be held to as long as it was lawful for the law to be observed according to the letter. But after that the grace of Almighty God, our Lord Jesus Christ, has appeared, the commandments of the law, which were spoken figuratively, can not be kept according to the letter. . . . On the Lord’s day, however, there should be a cessation of earthly labor, and attention given in every way to prayers, so that if anything is done negligently during the six days, it may be expiated by supplications on the day of the Lord’s resurrection.—“Epistles of Gregory the Great,” book 13, epistle 1. We may judge somewhat the laxity of Sunday observance in those times from the reproof administered by Gregory to Januaris, a bishop in Sardinia, to whom he wrote (book 9, epistle 1):— It has been told me that on the Lord’s day, before celebrating the solemnities of the mass, thou wentest forth to plow up the crop of the bearer of these presents; and after plowing it up, didst celebrate the solemnities of the mass. This work in the field before the Sunday mass, and by a bishop, shocked the Pope. He considerately added: “Since we know thy simplicity accompanying thy old age, we meanwhile hold our peace.” Those Sabbath-keepers in Rome could scarcely have been impressed by the strange jumble of argument advanced by so great a pope against their Scriptural teaching. But four centuries later this letter of Pope Gregory’s was again used against Sabbath-keeping witnesses. The Saxon princess, Margaret of England, had married King Malcolm of Scotland, in 1069. She was an ardent Catholic, and quickly learned that the ancient Culdee Church of Scotland, founded in early centuries by Columba and his teachers, was not fully following papal tradition. “They worked on Sunday, but kept Saturday in a Sabbatical manner.”—Lang’s “History of Scotland,” Vol. I, page 96. Queen Margaret set about to bring the Scottish church into line with Rome. The original record is in the “Life of St. Margaret,” by Talbot, her confessor. We give the following extracts from his account, quoting but a portion of some of the sections:— Section 16. Observing that many practises existed among the Scottish nation which were contrary to the rule of right faith and the holy customs of the universal church, she caused frequent councils to be held, in order that by some means or other she might, through the mercy of Christ, bring back into the way of truth those who had gone astray. Sec. 17. Among these councils the most important is that in which for three days she, with a very few of her friends [three priests had been sent her by Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury], combated the defenders of a perverse custom with the sword of the Spirit, that is to say, with the Word of God. . . . In this discussion the king himself took part as an assessor and chief actor, being fully prepared both to say and do whatever she might direct in the matter at issue. And as he knew the English language quite as well as his own, he was in this council a very exact interpreter for either side. Sec. 18. The queen introduced the subject under discussion by premising that all who serve one God in one faith along with the Catholic Church ought not to vary from that church by new or far-fetched usages. [They did not properly observe Lent and Easter, as this section goes on to show.] Sec. 20. Again, there were certain places in Scotland in which masses were celebrated according to some sort of strange rite [doubtless a comparatively simple celebration of the Lord’s supper in the vernacular, instead of in the Latin tongue], contrary to the usage of the whole church. Fired by the zeal of God, the queen attempted to root out and abolish this custom, so that henceforth, in the whole of Scotland, there was not one single person who dared to continue the practise. It was another custom of theirs to neglect the reverence due to the Lord’s day, by devoting themselves to every kind of worldly business upon it, just as they did upon other days. That this was contrary to the law, she proved to them as well by reason as by authority. “Let us venerate the Lord’s day,” said she, “because of the resurrection of our Lord, which happened upon that day, and let us no longer do servile works upon it; bearing in mind that upon this day we were redeemed from the slavery of the devil. The blessed Pope Gregory affirms the same, saying: ‘We must cease from earthly labor upon the Lord’s day, and we must devote ourselves entirely to prayer, so that upon the day of our Lord’s resurrection we may make expiation for such negligence as we may have committed during the six days.’ The same father, Gregory, after censuring with the greatest severity a certain piece of worldly business which had been done on the Lord’s day, decreed that the persons who had advised it should be excommunicated for two months.” The arguments of the queen12were unanswerable; and from this time forward those prudent men paid such respect to her earnestness that no one dared on these days either to carry any burden himself or to compel another to do so. So the Scottish people were led to fully follow Rome. But the forces of opposition were never able wholly to suppress the witness to God’s Sabbath in those early centuries. Through the Dark Ages, the light of this blessed truth was kept dimly burning, here and there, to break out brightly as the days of Reformation came. And all along the bitterest of persecution was waged against the Sabbath-keepers, even in times when Sunday itself was a holiday rather than a rest day. Sabbath-keeping was the thing that the enemy of truth hated, with the testimony that true Sabbath-keepers have always to bear against the assumed authority of apostasy, of which the Sunday institution is the mark. And so it is in the last days. The story of modern Sunday legislation shows that it is the testimony of loyalty to God’s law that the power behind all apostasy still seeks to silence, even as the prophecy says: “And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus.” Rev. 12:17. W. A. S.