iii. The necessary separation of Christians from Jews, in Jerusalem, for a part of public worship (Ac 2"), naturally led to a total separation else- where, as in successive cities the Jews rejected the gospel altogether (Ac 134° 14? 3- 23 187 19%). Besides these passages, assemblies consisting exclusively of Christians are implied wherever we find direc- tions for the reading of apostolic epistles (Ac 15%, 1 Th 5”, 2 Th 3%, Col 4'8, ef. He 10%). Assemblies of a whole Church, of course, imply fixed days for meeting. The antagonism already marked by different places for worship, coupled with the con- fessed antiquation of the Sabbath, would naturally find further expression in the observance of a
holy day different from that of the Jews. The origin of the Lord’s Day must not indeed be traced to mere opposition to Judaism, such as that naively contessed in the Didaché (8), ‘ Let not your fastings be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Monday and Thursday ; tut do ye keep your fast on Wednesday and Friday’; but this motive must have commended the observance of the first day of the week to a considerable number of Christians ; and if the argument from silence could be pressed, —an argument especially precarious in the case of an ordinance presumably so much a matter of course,—it would be significant that the distinct notices of the Lord’s Day in the NT are in connexion with Churches outside Palestine, t.e. Corinth, and by implication, Galatia (1 Co 16! *), Troas (Ac 20°), and Asia (Rev 1*), while Kupiaxés seems to have been applied to a specially Christian service before it was applied to a specially Christian day. Be that as it may, the first day of the week was certainly selected because the Lord Himself had sanctified it by His resurrection (Mt 281, Mk 167 8, Lk 241, Jn 20! 19), and had further emphasized it by a second appesratice to the disciples (Jn 20%), and again by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, which that year was also the first day of the week. We cannot cite as instances of the observance of this day the fact that on these three occasions the disciples were assembled together as if for a religious purpose. In those days of fear and excitement ey would naturally come together every day. The Lord’s ΤᾺΣ is therefore, in an especial sense, the feast of life The resurrection of Jesus Christ was not merely the raising to life of an individual man, but of human nature. On that first Lord’s Day our nature entered on a new life: actually, as regards the first-fruits of it; potentially, as regards every Christian in succeeding ages. But besides the life of the individual members, there is also the life of the body, and this sprang into birth on the day of Pentecost. Thus, without having recourse to the more or less fanciful analogies of some of the Fathers, we may, on sure grounds, contrast the remembrance on the Sabbath of the repose of the Creator of the physical world with the com- memoration on the Lord’s Day of the beginning of the activity of the new spiritual creation.
iv. Much reflex light is thrown on the apostolic Lord’s Day worship by the well-known passage (1 Apol. α. 67) where Justin Martyr, A.D. 150, describes the Sunday service. It consisted of the reading of the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets, followed by an exhorta- tion on the lessons read, common prayer, the Eucharist, and a collection for the orphans, ete. This service was probably modelled on that of the synagogue, with the necessary additions, the chief being the Eucharist, as in Ac 2°. If the passage in Ac be rightly understood to mean a daily service, it must be noted that the daily Eucharist of the early Jerusalem Church belongs to the same order of things as its community of goods; an ideal which«is practicable only under very special cir- cumstances. It may reasonably be conjectured that experience which speedily led to the abandon- ment οἱ the experiment in socialism, showed the wisdom of restricting the Eucharist to the Lord’s Day. This use, which is distinctly expressed in Justin and Pliny (‘stato die,’ lib. x. epist. 97), is implied in Ac 20’. The Eucharist is especially connected with the Lord’s Day, not only as the perpetual memorial of the great sin-offering (1 Cc 11%), but also as a means of renewing in us the divine life communicated in the first instance by the power of Christ’s resurrection, and as an anticipation of the consummation of this divine life at His coming (He 10%, Mt 26%, Mk 14%, Lk
LORD’S PRAYER
LORD'S PRAYER 14)
22's), Justin does not mention the agape. It had probably been temporarily dropped in obedience to the law of Trajan against clubs (Ramsay, Ch. in the Roman ἜΠΕΙΤ . 219). In 100 1] the agape seems to precede the Eucharist, in Ac 20" it follows (γευσάμενος, ‘having made a meal’). This change in the order of service was possibly made by St. Paul himself (1 Co 11). In Ac, as in Justin, the sermon precedes the Eucharist. The preaching of Jesus necessitated the telling of His deeds and words either from personal knowledge or from the written accounts of eye-witnesses, and this must have been from the beginning ; on the other hand, the reading of apostolic Epistles, at first occasional, could become constant only after the Canon was closed. The collection mentioned by Justin is founded on 1 Co 16*, where EV ‘lay by him in store’ conceals the fact that it must have been made at the weekly meeting; otherwise, collections would have been necessary on St. Paul’s arrival, the very thing he was anxious to avoid. παρ᾽ ἑαυτῷ τιθέτω θησαυρίζων means ‘let him assign a certain sum as he is disposed, and put it into the Church treasury.’ In Corinth and elsewhere the exercise of extra- ordin gifts formed part of the Sunday service (1 Co 14"), but this soon died out. Contrast the brief list of charismata in Eph 4" with that in 1 Co 1955,