History of the Sabbath and First Day of the Week - John N. Andrews

early days. Christians then for some centuries of
years were under persecution and poverty; and
besides their own wants, they had many of them
severe masters who compelled them to work, and
made them bestow less time in spiritual matters
than they otherwise would. In St. Jerome's age their
condition was better, because Christianity had got
into the throne as well as into the empire. Yet for
all this, the entire sanctification of the Lord’s Day
proceeded slowly; and that it was the work of time
to bring it to perfection, appears from the several
steps the church made in her constitutions, and
from the decrees of emperors and other princes,
wherein the prohibitions from servile and civil
business advanced by degrees from one species to
another, till the day had got a considerable figure in
the world. Now, therefore, the case being so much
altered, the most proper use of citing those old
examples is only, in point of doctrine, to show that
ordinary work, as being a compliance with
providence for the support of natural life, is not
sinful even on the Lord’s Day, when necessity is
loud, and the laws of that church and nation where
we live are not against it. This is what the first
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