Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism
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158 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM<br />
festival on every heathen festival. The church calendar<br />
became crowded with feasts and fasts. The<br />
cultus may be described as Allen describes it,—<br />
"one<br />
vast effort to put a stamp upon both time and<br />
space".<br />
There was really nothing new about the process.<br />
Every mythology, as we have seen (§3) rests upon<br />
an earlier mythology. Every Zeus rests on an<br />
earlier Zeus, every Apollo on an earlier Apollo,<br />
every Baal on an earlier Baal. So strong Is habit,<br />
so powerful is human instinct for continuity, that it<br />
is always easier to baptize a paganism than to reform<br />
it. Did not Israel herself try the experiment<br />
In a thorough manner? Was there not at one<br />
shrine a "Baal of the Covenant"? And was not<br />
the work of the prophets precisely the work of showing<br />
the difference between syncretism and reforTn?<br />
But the church had made it impossible for herself<br />
to profit by the Old Testament as a historical record.<br />
She had either rejected that record as "Jewish",<br />
or had allegorized It Into thin air.<br />
The best that she could do for the Sabbath, therefore,<br />
was to keep It on for a while, side by side<br />
with the venerable day of the Sun, re-baptized as<br />
the Lord's Day. From the latter part of the fourth<br />
century we have the Apostolic Constitutions, In<br />
which the Syrian Sabbath-keepers seem to receive
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