The Holy Scripture - english version B.indd - Sabbat

290THE PRESENT TRUTH - April, 1850.week was come, I mean the Saturdayand the Sunday upon which theChristians are wont to meet solemnlyin the church.“ And upon this passagewe find, by what was before noted thatthey esteemed and called the seventhdaythe Sabbath, and the first daypractice a tradition.From all that has been said, wemay observe, that first day observationwas brought in with much ado, andthat those decrees of men enforcingits observation there was allowedliberty to labor on the first day. Sothat it doth appear plainly from thesequotations, that it was not intended tobe kept, when first brought in, as nowit is observed, but that it is a traditionestablished and made sacred only by along standing custom.We may rermark, that this kind ofobservation did not at first produce aslighting, or at least such a slighting ofthe Sabbath, as hath since through longcustom followed. For almost the wholeworld kept to the Lord‘s Sabbath, andcelebrated the holy mysteries upon it,after these beginnings of the first day‘sobservation, as I have already notedout of Socrates. For the 8th chapterof his 6th book extends down to fourhundred and forty years after Christ;and Constantine reigned about the yearthree hundred and twenty. So that atfirst it was not even a slighting of theLord‘s holy seventh-day Sabbath; forthat Sabbath was kept in the church,with the first day, for several hundredyears.As we find by whom; and in whatmanner the first day observation camein, so we may see why it was broughtin, which was from some high halredagainst the Jews, whom they werevery apt to regard as worthy of allcontempt on the charge of crucifyingChrist {the Messiah}. Whether it beright to change a moral anc[ perpetualcommand of God, binding all men inall ages, for such a purpose, let theprofessed Christian judge. I find thatthis hatred began to be very high even inConstantine‘s time as may be observedin Eusebius‘ History of the Life ofConstantine, where it is said of him,that he made a law that no Christianshould serve a Jew; esteeming it awicked thing that they who had slainthe prophets, and cruelly put to deathour Lord {Master} and Saviour JesusChrist {Yahshua the Messiah}, shouldhold and keep in subjection those whowere redeemed with the blood of ourLord {Master} and Saviour. And ifany one lived already in that servilecondition that he should be released,and the Jew fined. From this kind ofhatred did the change of the Sabbathcome; and as was the tree, so is thefruit.The Jews make it an argument thatChrist {the Messiah} is not the Messiah,because Christians, who profess to behis followers, are Sabbath-breakers,concluding from thence, that Christ{the Messiah} himself was a Sabbathbreaker.And if so, they ask, whatbenefit can we expeet by the death ofan evildoer? Thus you may see whatevil consequences follow the nonobservanceof the Lord‘s holy Sabbath.Benius says, (Councils, book 3, lastpart, p. 1448,) that a council wascelebrated in Scotland about the firstbringing in of the dominical day, whichsome now call the Lord‘s day {Baal‘sday}, or Sunday, but he calls it thedominical day. This council, he says,was held A. D. 1203, in the time ofPope Innocent the Third.